The week of September 9 was a big one for tribal visits to Washington, D.C.
There was a fancy shindig at Vice President Joe Biden’s house where Indian bigwigs including Jackie Johnson Pata, John Dossett, Terri Henry, Jodi Gillette and others celebrated the passage of the pro-tribal sovereignty Violence Against Women Act earlier this year. A meeting of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), focusing on the budget crisis, sequestration, and tax issues, saw dozens of tribal leaders express concerns. There were Indian health-focused meetings with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Management and Budget. A Senate Committee on Indian Affairs hearing (sparsely attended by any senators) focused on water rights issues facing several tribes.
Tribal leaders used their time in Capital City to lobby federal officials for protection of the federal-tribal trust relationship, while trying to stave off budget cuts, enhance tribal sovereignty, and get more federal dollars flagged for reservation economic development.
Congress members, while sympathetic to the cause, couldn’t help but see dollar signs. Ever worried about winning the next election cycle, legislators from both sides of the aisle were quick to hit up tribal leaders for big bucks.
On the Republican side, Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) hosted a breakfast for his good friend Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID) September 12 at the exclusive Capitol Hill Club. The event was publicized and promoted by NCAI as part of its “Impact Days” meeting, and tribal leaders were encouraged to attend. Tickets ranged from $500 to $2,500. Organizer Shelly Roy has not responded to questions on how much money was raised, but the event was said to be well attended.
Cole told Indian Country Today Media Network that he was proud to host the breakfast, as he believes it is important for Indians to support Simpson. “Mike Simpson has been a real leader as chairman of the Interior appropriations subcommittee,” said the Chickasaw Nation citizen. “He deserves it.”
Democrats got in on the fundraising action in an even bigger way, with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on September 13 hosting a tribal fundraiser coffee reception at the Democratic National Committee headquarters where tickets also ranged from $500 to $2,500.
Tribal leaders were asked to support the campaigns of Democrats Ron Barber (AZ), Ami Bera (CA), Julia Brownley (CA), Lois Capps (CA), Suzan DelBene (WA), Pete Gallego (TX), Joe Garcia (FL), Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ), Dan Maffei (NY), Patrick Murphy (FL), Bill Owens (NY), Scott Peters (CA), Raul Ruiz (CA), and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ). Organizer Mary Ryan Douglass did not respond to questions about how much money was raised in total.
Chris Stearns, a Navajo lawyer with Hobbs Straus and a Native-focused campaign organizer, said he is proud of Democrats for reaching out to tribal leaders, and he thinks the current situation in Congress reflects a growing level of tribal clout in the American political system.
“I think that…tribes have now demonstrated success at the local and state levels in a way that is very powerful and deep,” Stearns said. “You are seeing a trickle-up effect. In fact, many of the new members of Congress already have a good familiarity with tribes from their days in lower office. So, tribes still bring the money, but now they bring more political clout, ties, and collegiality.”
Tribes have also presented themselves as major financial players on the national level. Data from July 2012 shows that tribes by then had given approximately $4 million to President Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and the Democratic and Republican Parties—not to mention localized and state-centric donations where tribes in Washington state alone have spent copy.1 million on political campaigns since the beginning of 2011.
Kalyn Free, a long-time Democratic Indian strategist and a Choctaw Nation citizen, also sees positives in the growing campaign finance outreach from Congress to tribes.
“As the fundraising increases, so does tribal influence with key lawmakers,” Free said. “We have made huge strides in a relatively short amount of time. As tribes become more comfortable in the political dialogue, it in turn raises the profile of issues critical to Native communities.”
Still, not all tribal leaders are convinced that these expensive fundraising festivities are worth it.
“Our so-called friends in Congress are not always willing to go to bat to take lumps for us,” said Ed Thomas, president of the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribe, as he lamented the current national budget situation and cuts to tribal programs at the same time tribes are being asked for major financial donations.
“I expect our friends to do something bold for us,” Thomas said. “If we are going to support them, we have to see results.”
A Washington family opens a hatchery in Hawaii to escape lethal waters.
Story by Craig Welch, Photographs by Steve Ringman, Source: Seattle Times
HILO, Hawaii — It appears at the end of a palm tree-lined drive, not far from piles of hardened black lava: the newest addition to the Northwest’s famed oyster industry.
Half an ocean from Seattle, on a green patch of island below a tropical volcano, a Washington state oyster family built a 20,000-square-foot shellfish hatchery.
Ocean acidification left the Nisbet family no choice.
Carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel emissions had turned seawater in Willapa Bay along Washington’s coast so lethal that slippery young Pacific oysters stopped growing. The same corrosive ocean water got sucked into an Oregon hatchery and routinely killed larvae the family bought as oyster seed.
So the Nisbets became the closest thing the world has seen to ocean-acidification refugees. They took out loans and spent $1 million and moved half their production 3,000 miles away.
“I was afraid for everything we’d built,” Goose Point Oyster Co. founder Dave Nisbet said of the hatchery, which opened last year. “We had to do something. We had to figure this thing out, or we’d be out of business.”
Oysters started dying by the billions along the Northwest coast in 2005, and have been struggling ever since. When scientists cautiously linked the deaths to plummeting ocean pH in 2008 and 2009, few outside the West Coast’s $110 million industry believed it.
Oysters from the Nisbets’ Hawaii hatchery are almost ready to be shipped to Willapa Bay and planted. When corrosive water off Washington rises to the surface, many oysters die before reaching this age.
Ed Jones, manager at the Taylor Shellfish Hatchery in Hood Canal’s Dabob Bay, pries open an oyster. Ocean acidification is believed to have killed billions of oysters in Northwest waters since 2005.
By the time scientists confirmed it early last year, the region’s several hundred oyster growers had become a global harbinger — the first tangible sign anywhere in the world that ocean acidification already was walloping marine life and hurting people.
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Worried oystermen testified before Congress. A few hit the road to speak at science conferences. Journalists visited the tidelands from Australia, Europe and Korea. Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire established a task force of ocean acidification experts, who sought ways to fight this global problem locally.
But the eight years of turmoil the Nisbet family endured trying to outrun their corroding tides offered them a unique perch from which to view debate over CO2 emissions.
And the world’s earliest victims of shifting ocean chemistry fear humanity still doesn’t get it.
“I don’t care if you think it’s the fault of humans or not,” Nisbet said. “If you want to keep your head in the sand, that’s up to you. But the rest of us need to get it together because we’re not out of the woods yet on this thing.”
A Goose Point Oyster Co. employee harvests fresh oysters at dawn on the Nisbet family’s tidelands in Willapa Bay. The Nisbets struggled to make ends meet in recent years as ocean acidification wiped out oyster reproduction in the bay and along the coast.
Shellfish ‘pretty much all we have’
To understand why the Nisbets landed in Hawaii, you first have to understand Willapa Bay.
At low tide on a crisp dawn, Dave Nisbet’s daughter, 27-year-old Kathleen Nisbet, bundled in fleece and Gore-Tex, steps from a skiff onto the glittering tide flats. Even at eight months pregnant, she is agile as a cat after decades of sloshing through mud in hip boots.
All around, employees scoop fresh shellfish from the surf and pile it in bins. Nisbet watches the harvest for a while, jokes with workers in Spanish, then clambers back into the boat.
“I’m always happy to get out here,” she whispers. “I never tire of it.”
The Nisbets were relative newcomers to shellfish.
Native Americans along the coast relied on shellfish for thousands of years. After settlers overfished local oysters, shipping them by schooner to San Francisco during the Gold Rush, farmers started raising bivalves here like crops. Now the industry in this shallow estuary and Puget Sound employs about 3,200 people and produces one-quarter of the nation’s oysters.
U.S. human sources of carbon dioxide
Source: U.S. EPA, Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times
Kathleen’s parents bought 10 acres of tidelands near Bay Center in 1975 and started growing their own, which Dave sold from the back of his truck. Sometimes Kathleen came along.
She sipped a baby bottle and ate cookies while riding the dredge with her father. She packed boxes and labeled jars with her mother, Maureene Nisbet, and piloted a skiff by herself at age 10 through lonely channels. She keeps a cluster of shells on her desk at the family processing plant to store business cards and office supplies.
“Willapa is about oyster and clam farming,” she said. “It’s pretty much all we have.”
Her parents built their business over decades, one market at a time. They eventually pieced together 500 acres of tidelands and hired 70 people.
For a long time, business was good — until, overnight, it suddenly wasn’t.
Dramatic crash
It’s hard to imagine now how far CO2 was from anyone’s mind when the oysters crashed.
A handful of healthy oyster seed from Goose Point Oyster Co.’s Hawaiian hatchery takes root on an adult oyster shell. When young oysters reach this age, they are strong enough to withstand the Northwest’s increasingly corrosive waters — at least for now.
In 2005, when no young oysters survived in Willapa Bay at all, farmers blamed the vagaries of nature. After two more years with essentially no reproduction, panic set in. Then things got worse.
By 2008, oysters were dying at Oregon’s Whiskey Creek Hatchery, which draws water directly from the Pacific Ocean. The next year, it struck a Taylor Shellfish hatchery outside Quilcene, which gets its water from Hood Canal. Owners initially suspected bacteria, Vibrio tubiashii. But shellfish died even when it wasn’t present.
Willapa farming is centered on the nonnative Pacific oyster, which was introduced from Japan in the 1920s. Some farms raise them in the wild, but that’s so complex most buy oyster seed from hatcheries to get things started.
The hatcheries spawn adult oysters, producing eggs and then larvae that grow tiny shells. When the creatures settle on a hard surface — usually an old oyster shell — these young mollusks get plopped into the bay and moved around for years until they fatten up.
Only a handful of hatcheries supply West Coast farmers, including Whiskey Creek and Taylor Shellfish, which sells seed only after meeting its own needs. So each spring, Kathleen’s parents put an order in with Whiskey Creek until the mid-2000s, when that option vanished.
“I do not think people understand the seriousness of the problem. Ocean acidification … has the potential to be a real catastrophe.”
“The hatchery had a long waiting list of customers and no seed, and we had a small window of time to get it into the bay,” Dave Nisbet recalled. “They had nothing.”
Whiskey Creek hatchery closed for weeks at a stretch. Production at Taylor Shellfish was off more than 60 percent. And more than just regular customers needed help.
With wild oysters not growing at all, suddenly hundreds of growers needed shellfish larvae. The entire industry was on the brink. Oyster growers from Olympia to Grays Harbor worried that in a few years’ time they would not be able to bring shellfish to market.
Nisbet made frantic calls, but could not find another source. He worked closely with Whiskey Creek, but owners there were stumped. Nisbet knew his business was in trouble.
“It’s like any other farm,” Dave Nisbet said. “If you don’t plant seed, sooner or later you don’t have crops. And there wasn’t enough seed to go around.”
In 2008, Kathleen Nisbet fretted about the prospect of laying off people her family had employed since she’d been in diapers. She feared that years of bad or no production could become the new normal.
Second-generation oyster farmer Kathleen Nisbet gets shuttled at sunrise from the Goose Point Oyster Co. processing plant in Bay Center, Pacific County, to the oyster flats of Willapa Bay. View photo gallery →
“It was really tough, as a second generation, to come in knowing the struggles we were going to have,” she said. “It’s really hard on a business when you’ve built something for the past 30 years and you have to take your business and basically cut it in half.”
But unless the family found a solution, they soon would have nothing to sell.
And no one, anywhere, could tell them what was wrong.
“I thought, ‘What are we going to do?’ ” Dave said.
Then the oyster growers met the oceanographers.
Corrosive waters rise to surface
Dick Feely, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had measured ocean chemistry for more than 30 years and by the early 2000s was noting a dramatic change off the West Coast.
Low pH water naturally occurred hundreds of feet down, where colder water held more CO2. But that corrosive water was rising swiftly, getting ever closer to the surface where most of the marine life humans care about lived.
So in 2007, Feely organized a crew of scientists. They measured and tracked that water from Canada to Mexico.
“What surprised us was we actually saw these very corrosive waters for the very first time get to the surface in Northern California,” he said.
That hadn’t been expected for 50 to 100 years. And that wasn’t the worst of it.
Because of the way the ocean circulates, the corrosive water that surfaces off Washington, California and Oregon is the result of CO2 that entered the sea decades earlier. Even if emissions get halted immediately, West Coast sea chemistry — unlike the oceans at large — would worsen for several decades before plateauing.
It would take 30 to 50 years before the worst of it reached the surface. Oregon State University scientist Burke Hales once compared that phenomenon to the Unabomber mailing a package to the future. The dynamite had a delayed fuse.
Feely published his findings in 2008. Shellfish growers took note. Some recalled earlier studies that predicted juvenile oysters would someday prove particularly sensitive to acidification. The oyster farmers invited Feely to their annual conference.
Feely explained that when north winds blew, deep ocean water was drawn right to the beach, which meant this newly corrosive water probably got sucked into the hatchery. That same water also flowed into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and made its way to Hood Canal.
The oyster industry pleaded with Congress, which supplied money for new equipment. Over several years, the hatcheries tested their water using high-tech pH sensors. When the pH was low, it was very low and baby oysters died within two days. By drawing water only when the pH was normal, shellfish production got back on track.
“They told us it was like turning on headlights on a car — it was so clear what was going on,” Feely said.
It wasn’t until 2012 that Feely and a team from Oregon State University finally showed with certainty that acidification had caused the problem. Early this summer OSU professor George Waldbusser demonstrated precisely how.
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Reporter Craig Welch, along with NOAA oceanographers Jeremy Mathis and Richard Feely, answer reader questions.
The oysters were not dissolving. They were dying because the corrosive water forced the young animals to use too much energy. Acidification had robbed the water of important minerals, so the oysters worked far harder to extract what they needed to build their shells.
Waldbusser still is not entirely sure why acidification has not yet hit other oyster species. It could be because other species, such as the native Olympic, have evolved to be more adaptable to high CO2, or because they rear larvae differently, or because they spawn at a time of year when corrosive water is less common. It could also be that acidification is just not quite bad enough yet to do them harm.
Either way, by then, the Nisbets had moved on. They had experimented with growing oysters in Hawaii and now had their own hatchery outside Hilo.
Manager David Stick outside Hawaiian Shellfish, the hatchery started near Hilo by Goose Point Oyster Co. It draws water from an underground saltwater aquifer rather than directly from the ocean.
Small fixes, big worries
David Stick opened a spigot from a tub that resembled an aboveground pool. He let water wash over a fine mesh screen. It was a muggy Hawaii morning and the Nisbets’ hatchery manager was straining oyster larvae.
When the tiny bivalves are big enough to produce shells, Stick mails them back to Washington. There, Kathleen’s crew plants them in the bay.
Instead of relying on the increasingly corrosive Northwest coast, the family built a hatchery that drew on something else — a warm, underground, saltwater aquifer. That water source is not likely to be affected by ocean chemistry changes for many decades, if at all.
But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing more to fear.
For now, no one else has taken as dramatic a step as the Nisbets. The Northwest industry is getting around the problem. Hatcheries have changed the timing of when they draw in water. Scientists installed ocean monitors that give hatchery owners a few days notice that conditions will be poor for rearing larvae.
Growers are crushing up shells and adding chemicals to the water to make it less corrosive. Shellfish geneticists are working to breed new strains of oysters that are more resistant to low pH water.
But no one thinks any of that will work forever.
Hatchery worker Brian Koval transfers algae from a beaker to a larger vessel in the Nisbets’ oyster hatchery in Hawaii. View photo gallery →
“I do not think people understand the seriousness of the problem,” Stick said. “Ocean acidification is going to be a game-changer. It has the potential to be a real catastrophe.”
At the moment, the problem only strikes oysters at the very early stages of their development, within the first week or so of life. Once they have built shell and are placed back on the tide flats, they tend to deal better with sea chemistry changes.
But how long will that be the case? How would they respond to changes in the food web?
“The algae is changing,” Stick said. “The food source that everything depends on is changing. Will things adapt? We don’t know. We’ve never had to face anything like this before.”
An urgency to educate
With one young son, and a baby on the way, it’s been impossible for Kathleen not to think about her own next generation.
“Thank God my dad took a proactive measure to protect me,” she said. “If he wouldn’t have done that, I would suffer and my son would suffer.”
She thinks a lot about the need for school curricula and other efforts to get kids and adults thinking and learning about changing sea chemistry.
“I don’t think that our government is recognizing that ocean acidification exists,” she said. “I don’t think society understands the impacts it has. They think ocean acidification … no big deal, it’s a huge ocean.”
But the reality is, over the next decade, the world will have to make progress tackling this issue.
“We’re living proof,” Nisbet said. “If you ignore it, it’s only going to get worse. Plain and simple: It will get worse.”
Wildlife Conservation Society The map illustrates the global distribution of the climate stability/ecoregional intactness relationship. Ecoregions with both high climate stability and vegetation intactness are dark grey. Ecoregions with high climate stability but low levels of vegetation intactness are dark orange. Ecoregions with low climate stability but high vegetation intactness are dark green. Ecoregions that have both low climate stability and low levels of vegetation intactness are pale cream.
Southern and southeastern Asia, western and central Europe, eastern South America and southern Australia are among the regions most vulnerable to climate change on Earth, a new map compiled by the Wildlife Conservation Society shows. But Turtle Island and much of Indian country are not far behind.
This map, unlike previous assessments, factors in the condition of the areas surveyed rather than simply looking at climate change’s effects on landscapes and seascapes. The human activity that has shaped many of these regions already must be factored in, the map’s creators said in a statement, because that helps determine how susceptible the areas will be to the influences of the world’s changing climate.
“We need to realize that climate change is going to impact ecosystems both directly and indirectly in a variety of ways and we can’t keep on assuming that all adaptation actions are suitable everywhere,” said James Watson, who led the study as director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Climate Change Program, in a statement from the WCS on September 17.
“A vulnerability map produced in the study examines the relationship of two metrics: how intact an ecosystem is, and how stable the ecosystem is going to be under predictions of future climate change,” the society said in its statement. “The analysis creates a rating system with four general categories for the world’s terrestrial regions, with management recommendations determined by the combination of factors.”
The dark green areas of the map, which are much of northern Canada, delineate areas of low climate stability but a high rate of intact vegetation, the society said. Wildlife Conservation Society scientists were joined in the map’s creation by researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia and Stanford University in California. The research was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
One of the goals of compiling the map was to determine the best places to invest conservation resources, the society said. The areas with the most stable climate have the best chance of preserving species if efforts are amped up there, the society said.
“The fact is there is only limited funds out there and we need to start to be clever in our investments in adaptation strategies around the world,” Watson said. “The analysis and map in this study is a means of bringing clarity to complicated decisions on where limited resources will do the most good.”
On Thursday, the House will vote on a bill that would direct the Secretary of Agriculture to convey more than 2,400 acres of U.S. Forest Service land in southeast Arizona to the Resolution Cooper Mining Co. Enactment of the bill would allow Resolution Cooper, dually owed by Rio Tinto Mining and BHP Billiton, to operate a large-scale cooper mine on Oak Flat disrupting sacred tribal grounds.
If passed, this bill referred to as the Southeast Arizona Land Exchange Act, could potentially destroy sacred tribal places of worship by allowing the foreign mining giants to extract one cubic mile of ore from beneath the surface of the earth. The mining companies would extract the ore through an ecologically destructive process called block cave mining.
In 2011, ICTMN reported that Resolution Copper would use controversial block-cave method, in which explosives are set off below the ore body, creating a space underneath and allowing the ore to collapse from its own weight, after which it’s extracted. Opponents fear the method could damage Native American sacred lands, among them the historical Apache Leap, where tribal warriors leaped to their deaths rather than surrender to Arizona soldiers, according to historical accounts like this one.
In a press release, Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) urged colleagues to vote “no” on the bill and said that Oak Flat has been a place where Native Americans have prayed, gathered medical herbs and plants, healed in holy perennial springs, and performed religious ceremonies for decades.
“The protection of places of worship is a fight for which we should all be united,” Moore wrote in a press release to her colleagues. “We must stand together to protect places of worship, including tribal sacred sites because these sites are part of the rich heritage and culture of our country and the essence of our moral identies.” She said the bills passage would jeopardize the cultural history of other sacred sites by setting a precedent with regard to federal protection of tribal sites.
The bill was introduced by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) in February. Last month, Gosar invited the public to a town hall meeting to gage support of his efforts to bring thousands of jobs to Arizona’s Copper Corridor. He said this goal could be achieved if 678 is passed. “Getting this critical jobs bill across the finish line requires Arizonans to rise up and let their voices be heard. Nearly 4,000 jobs and billions of dollars in economic activity are at stake.”
The withdrawal of Resolution Cooper’s controversial block cave mining process is supported by the San Carlos Apache Tribes, local tribes, and some environmentalists.
Arizona Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ)
The project has also been opposed by Arizona Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ) whowrote about his oppositionto the bill saying that he was not opposed to mining, in principle, but said that they should not come at the expense of Native American rights.
ICTMN also reported that the bill would give around 2,400 acres of public land in southeastern Arizona to Resolution Cooper Co. in exchange for around 5,000 acres in several parcels around the state. As it stands, the bill has largely remained the same.
The federal government has acknowledged its obligation to protect sacred tribal grounds, but if the land swap bill passes, Moore said, Oak Bluff would be transferred to Resolution Copper for private ownership, and out of the domain of regulation by federal law.
“People who think money is first over water and land, such as some people in Washington, are destroying the earth and that’s where our argument is,” San Carlos Apache Tribe Chairman Wendsler Nosie, told ICTMN in 2010. “That’s wrong. You cannot do that, and that’s why I’m standing up for this.”
Those interested in helping Seattle’s homeless Native population can now do so by picking up a limited-edition, signed poster by Nooksack artist Louie Gong.
Proceeds from the posters, which are on sale at KessInHouse.com for $25 each, benefit Chief Seattle Club, an organization that provides food, services “a sacred space to nurture, affirm and renew the spirit of urban Native peoples.” The poster design is Gong’s “good morning” pattern, which features a pair of hummingbirds and a coffee cup that repeat seamlessly. (The pattern is currently the main motif of Gong’s new housewares line, and is featured on blankets, pillows, and shower curtains — check them out at eighthgeneration.com/collections/housewares.)
‘Good morning’ poster by Louie Gong
The 24″x36″ posters have been produced in a limited edition of 200, and each will be signed by Gong.
This Date in Native History: History.com says the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, England, on September 16, 1620, but is that accurate? According to Wampanoag history, the Mayflower sailed with 102 passengers 10 days earlier—on September 6, 1620—after two failed attempts to leave England.
Accounts vary of the voyage that forever changed America for its first inhabitants.
History.com says the Mayflower completed its 66-day journey across the Atlantic Ocean on November 21, 1620. Other sources, including experts at Plimoth Plantation, a nonprofit living history museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts, say the journey ended November 11, 1620, when colonists disembarked at Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the tip of Cape Cod.
The Mayflower, which weighed 180 tons and was about 100 feet long and 20 feet wide, departed with another ship, the Speedwell, twice in August 1620. Both ships returned to dock when the Speedwell was found to be unseaworthy, according to the written history of William Bradford, a separatist, leader of the voyage to the New World and first governor of the settlement. The Mayflower then made the journey on its own.
Bradford’s history states that the successful voyage began September 6 when the colonists “put to sea.” They landed in Provincetown on November 11, Bradford wrote. It was a Monday.
The ship was headed for Virginia, where colonists were authorized by the British crown to settle. Some of the colonists sought religious freedom while many others were dissatisfied with economic opportunities. Stormy weather and navigation errors forced the Mayflower 500 miles off course and colonists landed on Cape Cod.
Upon landing, Bradford wrote this: “Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean.”
By December, the colonists had moved across the bay to Plymouth, establishing the first permanent white settlement in America.
For thousands of years before that, however, the Wampanoag village of Patuxet had flourished on the same land, said Darius Coombs, associate director of the Wampanoag Indigenous Program at Plimoth Plantation.
“At the time, that was a Wampanoag community,” said Coombs, who is one of about 25 Wampanoag people who work at Plimoth Plantation’s Wampanoag Homesite. “We had trade ships coming for 100 years before that, but the ships, the people, didn’t stay. So this wasn’t our first encounter with outsiders.”
When settlers arrived in Plymouth, they found cleared fields and fresh water. Despite this, colonial leaders like Bradford claimed the land was “unpeopled.” According to English tradition, lands without clear title were available to the first people to permanently inhabit it.
But the Wampanoag had simply moved to their winter homes away from the coast, having buried their food supply in Patuxet to store it, Coombs said.
“When the early settlers came, it was winter, so they came after we left the summer homes for the season,” he said. “They found Native burial grounds, which were disturbed, and they dug up our buried food.”
According to Coombs, the settlers actually were lucky that they arrived in 1620 instead of five years before that. A plague, most likely carried by Europeans, spread across New England from 1616 to 1618, wiping out as many as 70 to 90 percent of the tribe’s population.
“There were more than 70 Wampanoag communities at one time,” he said. “The Mayflower changed history for our people.”
Coombs for the last 25 years has worked at the Wampanoag Homesite, where tribal members live present-day culture and tell the truth about history. That history includes loss of land, slavery, rape and genocide, he said.
“This is present-day Wampanoag, but I’ll tell you, not everyone can do this,” he said. “Not everyone can talk about what happened because it still hurts down to the core.”
Regardless of the exact dates the Mayflower sailed, the voyage was a game-changer for American Indians. Activist and author Vine Deloria Jr., in his famous book Custer Died for your Sins, commentated on the Mayflower and the Pilgrims.
“Many Indians, of course, believe it would have been better if Plymouth Rock had landed on the Pilgrims than the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock,” he wrote. “Nothing was more destructive of man than the early settlements on this continent.”
Courtesy Xiuhezcatl Martinez Xiuhezcatl Martinez a 13-year-old indigenous youth with Mother Earth’s wellbeing on his mind
By Vincent Schilling, Indian Country Today Media Network
Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, (his first name pronounced ‘Shoe-Tez-Caht’) is a 13-year-old indigenous environmental activist, rapper and public speaker from Boulder, Colorado. He is also the youth director of Earth Guardians, a youth based environmental non-profit organization that is committed to protecting the water, air, earth, and atmosphere.
At the early age of six, Xiuhtezcatl began speaking to crowds at rallies and demonstrations and has spoken at such events as the United States iMatter March in Denver in 2010, which was attended by more than 2,000 youths and other events. He has also worked with Boulder City council members to change city policy and has traveled to several countries and cities to include Rio De Janeiro and Washington D.C. about environmental concerns for Mother Earth.
This year, he has been invited to speak at the United Nations. He is also the youngest member of the 2013 Presidential Youth Council.
A piano composer whose music was used in a documentary that featured him and was filmed by Peter Gabriel’s organization – Witness, recently did an interview on Native Trailblazers radio. During the interview the young Earth Guardian shared his message of strength and hope and how he hopes to remain an inspiration for others.
How did you get started doing what you are doing?
That is a great question. I have been doing activism since I have been six years old. Also we’ve been organizing rallies and educating kids at schools. Kids can be inspired to become activists, leaders and change makers in their community.
Tell me about you as a hip-hop singer with impressive videos.
We have a performance group and we write positive rap songs with lyrics to educate and inspire kids. Kids these days, teenagers these days, everyone is listening to music. That is a huge part of our culture in general. There is a huge hip-hop culture, including slam poetry and break dancing. There are all of these different branches off of hip-hop culture.
Can you talk about your song “Be the Change?”
We got this idea to write a song that was a little bit different and outside the box. We want to make the song uplifting and empowering so that when people hear it, they will say, ‘Dang, I want to do something about fracking, about climate change or about the next generation’s future.’
The song is based on Mahatma Gandhi’s theory and most famous quotes, ‘Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” He is a huge role model of mine.
It is a really cool inspiring song and I hope everyone likes it.
Can you explain your Earth Guardian movement?
The Earth Guardian movement is a gateway and a portal to act for people of any age. No matter whom they are or where they are in the world. It doesn’t matter what your status is in society – none of this matters, we can all be Earth Guardians.
This movement is growing globally. People can see young people standing up in their communities and they are changing things that are not working, so that their world is a better place.
When people see this, they say, “I want to do something similar to that.’ people tell me they have a 12-year-old son who wants to get involved, we get such e-mails all the time. It is very hard to keep track of everything. Right now we have 30 requests to set up Earth Guardian groups. Right now there are places in Canada, Germany, France in other places around the world are requesting these Earth Guardian groups. There are groups going now in Australia, Brazil, India and Africa.
You are also a public speaker in a lot of places aren’t you?
There is a large rally in Washington D.C. called Powershift. Out of the thousands of requests they receive each year, this year they accepted my application to deliver a presentation. I will be giving a presentation on the global effects of fracking. We are currently working on fundraising for that.
In New York there will be a huge U.N. conference at the end of September. It is about the global water crisis and what people are doing about it around the world. If you think about it, water is the most basic necessity of life. If we do not have access to clean sustainable water supply, we do not have life. This is a human rights issue.
Just today in my fifth period science class we were talking about the characteristics of living things. One of the characteristics of living things is that they all require H2O. It is not a living thing if it does not require water. That stuck out to me. There is a huge global issue with our water supply – This is what the United Nations conference will be about.
The Pope is going to stream in, the Dalai Lama is going to stream in about the water, so it is a huge deal. Young people and activists from all over the world have been asked to come in and talk. They invited myself and representatives from the other Earth Guardian groups in Australia and Africa and others.
All of these leaders will be tuning into this conference. Never before in history, have we had the opportunity to stay connected with social media. All of these things are keeping our world connected. This is how movements are starting to spread all over the world.
Ultimately we are all working together toward the same thing, to create a better future for the next generation. Whether it is working on the water crisis, hunger – we are working on creating a better world for people.
Can you tell us about your song – “Live as if our Future Matters?”
We cannot wait for our government to change the world, before power, before money, before greed – their purpose is to protect people. In my eyes they have failed us at that, so now it is time for the people to stand up for themselves and to be part of this global movement that is going to change the fundamental beliefs of our entire society.
Who is the other young guy in your video?
That is my younger brother. He is an amazing rapper who has a great stage presence. He is so adorable and everyone loves him. He comes out with his black pants and black leather jacket like Michael Jackson everyone goes crazy, he doesn’t like to speak.
He is so great to have around. We’ve gone to Australia, Oregon, and Rio de Janeiro. In Brazil we had a four-hour bus drive; we spent the whole time laughing. That was great, if I didn’t have him with me on my side, I don’t know that I could do it.
What can kids do?
I go to school and I have advanced classes so I have a lot of extra work but I still play soccer – someone cannot force you to do this you have to ask yourself is this something that is important enough to take time out of my everyday life to do something like this. Kids don’t understand this really is not a joke. You know it’s not about polar bears and icecaps you have to turn this into something that affects us in our own backyard. Nature is not a separate being from us.
When we can realize the problems of the Arctic and Alaska and Africa and the Amazon rain forest they are our problems too – we come from the same planet and as soon as we recognize that, then they will be willing to make a change.
Do your teachers get nervous when you raise your hand in class?
(Laughs) In general I’m a very talkative person. My teachers don’t want to call on me because I talk forever.
Do you have any last words?
My school is giving the award for all the work that I’ve been doing, and that is very exciting to be recognized. To all the young people and adults, to anyone of any color no matter where you are from. Please think that we as humans, the greatest, have the most amazing opportunity in the entire world. Our generation with the elders, adults and youth on this planet – this generation now has the greatest opportunity of any generation.
We have opportunity to change our fundamental beliefs, and we can take the next step in our evolution from this consumption of greed, we have the opportunity to evolve and grow and prosper from that. This generation, this is what we are meant to do – to bring forth a new revolution in a new mindset to this world.
If we work together we can do it. Please everyone get involved, because we need you all out there.
Oh and yes, I truly could not do anything without my mom. I could not have done any of this in the past six or seven years of my life without her so I give a huge shout out to her. I could not have grown into who I am without her she is a huge part of what I’ve done. I love her so much.
Opponents of a food labeling initiative are gearing up to air their first television commercials in an ad campaign expected to cost millions of dollars and run up to Election Day in November.
A copy of a contract filed with the Federal Communication Commission shows the No on Initiative 522 campaign has booked $72,000 worth of advertising this week on KOMO-TV in Seattle. A 30-second spot would air beginning with the early-morning newscast Monday, according to the contract.
Additional contracts reserve time every day on the station through the last day of voting, Nov. 5.
A representative of the campaign declined to confirm the schedule, which could be amended after the filing of the contracts.
“I am not going to give out our playbook,” said campaign spokeswoman Dana Bieber.
Supporters of the measure are anticipating the launch of television ads now that the opposition has received millions of dollars from Monsanto and DuPont, two corporations that worked to defeat a similar labeling measure in California in 2012.
“This goes to show these corporations are really more focused on protecting their bottom line than giving grocery shoppers in Washington state more information about their food,” said Elizabeth Larter, spokeswoman for the Yes on 522 campaign.
If passed, Initiative 522 would require many food products made with genetically modified ingredients to be labeled as such. This would apply primarily to processed and packaged foods sold in supermarkets and other retail outlets.
What this means, for example, is a product made with corn, canola or soybeans grown from scientifically created seed stock would need a label to inform the buyer of the modified ingredients. Snack foods such as chips and soft drinks that contain artificial ingredients would need labels starting in July 2015.
Supporters argue the measure is about giving shoppers more information about what’s in the food they consume. Labels would not be required on food sold in restaurants nor on dairy and meat products, even if the cattle are fed genetically engineered foods.
Opponents counter that I-522 would create new and costly burdens on farmers and businesses and would increase food costs. They also say the state will need to spend money to enforce the labeling law.
As of Friday, the No on 522 Committee had raised nearly $12 million in donations and pledges, according to reports filed with the state Public Disclosure Commission. After expenditures, the committee had a little over $10 million available.
“We plan to use our resources to share with voters how misleading 522 is and how it is going to increase grocery costs by hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year,” Bieber said.
The majority of the opposition money arrived this month from the two companies, which are among the nation’s biggest producers of genetically modified seed products.
Monsanto wrote a $4.6 million check on Sept. 5, pushing its total donations to the campaign to roughly $4.85 million. On Sept. 10, DuPont gave $3.2 million and is now up to nearly $3.4 million in contributions.
The level of spending should come as no surprise. Last year, the two firms topped all contributors to the effort to defeat Proposition 37 in California.
In that campaign, Monsanto gave $8.1 million and DuPont $5.4 million, according to state campaign finance reports compiled by Ballotpedia.org.
In Washington, as of Friday, the Yes on 522 committee had collected $3.5 million in donations and, after expenditures, had about $2.6 million available in cash. The single largest donor is Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, which has given roughly $1 million.
Reports filed with the FCC show the committee reserved time starting in mid-October on KOMO.
A statewide poll released last week shows the measure enjoys strong backing among potential voters. Of the 406 registered voters surveyed in the Elway Poll, 66 percent expressed support, with only 21 percent opposed. The survey has a margin of error of 5 percent.
Larter predicted the numbers will change once ads begin airing.
TULSA, OKLAHOMA – The American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association presents the session “Tourism Trends: Indigenous Fashion” at the 15th Annual American Indian Tourism Conference at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Tulsa, September 22-26.
Fashion is an important part of every community and can be a valuable product for tourism programs. The panel consists of three Native designers work with traditional, historic and contemporary fashion. These ladies will describe their journeys in clothing design and how their works are used in living history re-enactments, cultural demonstrations and mainstream fashion events.
“My culture has influenced my work so much and has given me more of a voice in the fashion industry,”
said Margaret Roach Wheeler of Mahota Handwovens and costume designer for Chickasaw Nation.
“There is an excitement among people over fashion and designs that relate to cultural history. I’m able to design pieces that reflect tribal traditions, yet make them edgy and modern for today.”
Fashion Speakers
Margaret Roach Wheeler, a Chickasaw textile artist discusses her early work, the textile pieces she is creating for the Chickasaw Nation. At the Chickasaw Arts Academy, she teaches fashion design to high school students. Each year, the Academy provides two students with scholarships to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. She is a descendant of the Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes.
Tonia Hogner-Weavel has been called a living cultural treasure by Cherokee Nation for her historic research. She designed the period clothing for Diligwa, a living 1710 Cherokee Village, and the Cherokee tear dresses for the Cherokee Nation Youth Choir. She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
Lisa Rutherford is an award winning artist recreates southeast appliqué Cherokee beadwork and clothing, using materials as authentic as possible from the late 1700s to early 1800s. She collaborated with Navajo designer Orlando Dugi who took her traditional southeast feather cape and made it haute couture on the runway. She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
The annual American Indian Tourism Conference strives to provide all who attend with a quality educational forum to help you with your travel and tourism initiatives. Other sessions this year include tour packaging, attracting tour operators, creating itineraries, positioning your tribe for the international tour market, protecting intellectual and cultural property, working with state and federal agencies, and more.
Indian Health Service (IHS) officials are pushing back against tribal concerns over an Obama administration plan that would cut contract support cost (CSC) reimbursements to tribes as part of the federal budget’s continuing resolution currently being considered by Congress.
At least 45 tribes and tribal organizations have written to Congress, asking for protection against the proposal, which they say cheats tribes out of millions of dollars they are due. They believe the proposed tribe-by-tribe federal cap on CSC funding would wipe out tribal legal claims and put tribes in the difficult position of being required to spend large amounts of money to administer contract support programs without providing them the funding to do so.
IHS leaders say the tribal concerns have been heard, but the administration believes the plan still needs to be implemented by Congress due to federal budget concerns and sequestration.
“The Administration’s decision was made after careful consideration of all views,” Dianne Dawson, a spokeswoman for IHS, told Indian Country Today Media Network by e-mail. “This option is a short-term approach in this difficult budget climate and is consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision in Salazar V. Ramah Navajo Chapter. We are currently consulting with tribes to find a long-term solution for CSC funding.”
Tribal leaders, concerned that they will be shortchanged millions of dollars, are not moved by the administration’s response, and they say it opposes the June 2012 Salazar v. Ramah Navajo Chapter ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that said the federal government must pay for the full CSC incurred by tribes while providing healthcare and other governmental services for their tribal citizens through Indian Self-Determination Act contract agreements.
“Our views were never asked for, and so the only views that were considered were views within the administration,” Edward Thomas, president of the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes, told ICTMN after reviewing the administration’s response.
“This proposal should never be a short-term solution without clarifying what the impact would be,” Thomas added. “[This] interpretation of the Supreme Court decision as a budget or financial issue is wrong and not consistent with promises made by the President to not try to balance this nation’s budget on the backs of the less fortunate.”
Thomas noted that tribes have interpreted the Supreme Court decision to mean that finally the federal government must pay for the cost of tribes administering programs on their behalf. “The Supreme Court ruled in Ramah that the U.S. must pay 100 percent of our tribal CSC costs,” he said. “Maybe President Obama should tell his officials to read Ramah again and again until they get it. It appears to me that White House OMB [Office of Management and Budget] is opposing the President indirectly and this should never happen.”
Thomas said the right “long-term solution is to put 100 percent funding of indirect costs into each and every budget. It isn’t complicated. This can easily be absorbed by the administration.”
Lloyd Miller, an Indian affairs lawyer with Sonosky Chambers who represents several tribes with pending CSC claims, says that the administration framing of this situation as a budget issue is flat-out wrong. “A special account exists in the Treasury to pay any claims over contract shortfalls,” he said. “No other government contractors are being treated this way. The administration’s proposal to cut off tribal contract rights is nothing less than racial discrimination.”
Added Miller, “They seem to think that tribes are comfortable with treating contracts to operate government facilities as mere grants, with the tribes happy to cut services if the promised payments fall short. That is a bad miscalculation. Tribes have far too much knowledge of broken treaties, and they will not sit still while IHS seeks cover to break its contract obligations.”
In light of the administration’s response, Congress members are vowing to continue to fight the proposal. Republican leaders chose not to include the language in their continuing resolution proposal released September 10, but that legislation is on hold, since some conservative members of the Republican caucus want the continuing resolution to include language that would vote down Obamacare. The Senate has yet to decide if it will take up the CSC plan.
There will be a partial government shutdown if Congress can’t pass a continuing resolution by October 1.
Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), chair of the Subcommittee on Indian and Alaska Native Affairs, has taken the lead against decrying the administration’s CSC proposal, and he says their new rationale rings untrue.
“The administration is claiming that their proposed hard cap on contract support cost funding is both short-term and consistent with Ramah, and their claim is false on both fronts,” Young told ICTMN. “Their proposal would deny tribes compensation that they are rightfully due and has harmful long-term implications for health care delivery throughout Indian country.”
Young said that the tight federal budget “may continue to exist long into the future,” yet it “does not diminish the federal government’s trust responsibility.
“The real problem is not the budget climate, but the administration’s unwillingness to prioritize Native healthcare,” Young said.
Source: U.S. EPA, Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times
