Chairman Mel Sheldon swears in Marie Zackuse and Theresa Sheldon to the Tulalip Tribes Board of Directors Photo: Monica Brown
By Monica Brown, Tulalip News Writer
TULALIP, Wash.- Family and friends arrived early Saturday morning, April 6th, at the Tulalip Administration building to witness the swearing in of Marie M. Zackuse and Theresa Sheldon to the Tulalip Tribes Board of Directors.
Tulalip Tribes Board of Directors, Chuck James, Theresa Sheldon, Glen Gobin, Melvin R. Sheldon Jr, Marlin Fryberg Jr, Marie M. Zackuse, Deborah Parker Photo: Monica Brown
Marie M. Zackuse thanks the board for welcoming her back as she takes her seat on the Services Committee of the Board Photo: Monica Brown
As Zackuse was welcomed to take her seat on the Services Committee along side Deborah Parker and Marlin Fryberg Jr, she responded, “I want to thank each and everyone that came today, my family and my elders.”
“I’m very grateful today that the Creator provided this opportunity once again for me and I will do the best that I can with what I know and what I have. I want to thank everybody who helped me”
New board member Theresa Sheldon thanks the board as they welcome her on the Business Committee of the board Photo: Monica Brown
“There are just so many inspirational elders and people in our community who helped encourage me to get to this point where I am today” said Sheldon as she took her seat along side Glen Gobin and Chuck James on the Business Committee.”It ‘s the beginning of a new journey and I am truly honored to be here and assist with this board of directors.”
“I’m very thankful for this and I’m excited to get work done”
Zackuse and Sheldon were elected March 16th 2013, at the Annual General Council meeting, they will both serve three year terms.
This year’s TL’aneq’ benefit dinner includes a live fashion show by international designer Dorothy Grant
Ryan Key-Wynne, Public Information Officer, Northwest Indian College
International designer Dorothy Grant, who is Kaigani Haida from Alaska, will host a live fashion show at Northwest Indian College’s biggest fundraiser of the year. Grant’s unique style combines traditional Haida artwork with contemporary clothing for an effect that has gained her worldwide acclaim. Photo courtesy of Dorothy Grant
On April 12, Northwest Indian College (NWIC) will host its 5th Annual TL’aneq’: Gathering for a Celebration benefit dinner and Native cultural arts and experiences auction from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Swinomish Casino & Lodge. The event is the college’s biggest fundraising event of the year and – this year – will also celebrate NWIC’s 30th anniversary.
“I am truly looking forward to this year’s TL’aneq’ benefit dinner. This is a great opportunity to celebrate Coast Salish art and culture and share a meal and laughter, all while raising money to support our students,” NWIC President Justin Guillory said. “This has been a successful event, and we want to continue to build on that success by bringing friends and supporters of NWIC together in a good way for a good cause.”
The evening will begin with a silent auction, during which attendees will have a chance to bid on Coast Salish art – including paintings, carvings, jewelry and woven pieces – and they can speak directly with artists who have donated their work for the event. After that, a four-course dinner featuring fresh salmon, storytelling, a live fashion show and live auction will begin.
“You never know what will happen during the live auction,” said Ryan Key-Wynne, NWIC’s public information officer. “Last year, one of our supporters commandeered the mic and pleaded with others in the room to bid with her on a cultural experience. She said the experience would be a good opportunity to make new friends.”
Key-Wynne explained that bidding is usually competitive, with people bidding against each other, not with each other.
“Our auctioneer just stood there laughing, waiting for her to hand the mic back,” Key-Wynne said. “It was unprecedented, but very funny and the combined bid raised more than she would have contributed on her own.”
Coast Salish artists are the backbone of the TL’aneq’ fundraiser. Art, including this carving by Steven Charlie of the Squamish Nation, is donated by the artists each year and all of the profits help support a selected NWIC project or program. This year, all funds raised will go toward scholarships for NWIC students. Photo courtesy of NWIC
This year’s live auction will be preceded by a fashion show by international designer Dorothy Grant, who is Kaigani Haida from Alaska. Grant’s unique style combines traditional Haida artwork with contemporary clothing for an effect that has gained her worldwide acclaim.
“We are honored that Dorothy Grant will be joining our efforts at the college’s premier gala. Her fashion show willbe a lot of fun, especially with our student models,” said Greg Masten, director of NWIC’s Development Office, which organizes the event.
Last year, the event raised nearly $100,000, which helped NWIC match a $500,000 award from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the college’s new Coast Salish Institute Building.
Funds from this year’s event will go toward supporting NWIC student scholarships. NWIC, which is the only tribal college in Washington and Idaho, has a student body that represents more than 120 tribes from across the nation.
“It’s a misconception that Native students get their education paid for.Scholarships mean a lot to our students, many of whom are the first in their families to attend college and who are working toward four and two year degrees so they can help their tribal communities,” Masten said.
Individual tickets are available for $250 or table sponsorships are available from $2,500 to $20,000.
NWIC would like to thank sponsors for the 5h Annual TL’aneq:
·Premier Sponsor: Lummi Indian Business Council
·Host Sponsor: Swinomish Tribe
·Exclusive Reception Sponsor: Tulalip Tribes
·Lengesot Patron Sponsors at the $5,000 level: the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, and the Snoqualmie Tribe
·Cedar Sponsors at the $2,500 level: The Boeing Company, Puget Sound Energy, Morgan Stanley, and the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe
NWIC would also like to acknowledge and thank Judy Mich for her continued generosity of a $15,000 sponsorship, and give a special thanks to the generosity of the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians.
For more information, to donate to the event or to buy a ticket or sponsor a table, contact Development Office staff Mariah Dodd at (360) 392-4217 or mariahd@nwic.edu or Colleen Baker at (360) 392- 4305 or cbaker@nwic.edu.
(Courtesy Dakota Goodhouse/TheFirstScout.blogspot.com) Killdeer Mountain, home of the Singing Butte, looms on the edge of the North Dakota Badlands. (Courtesy Dakota Goodhouse/TheFirstScout.blogspot.com)
The Hess Corporation’s development of oil resources on Taĥċa Wakutėpi (Killdeer Mountain) on the edge of the North Dakota badlands threatens to destroy the integrity of a site sacred to tribes and important to historians, wildlife biologists, archaeologists and local landowners.
In a June 2010 report on the preservation of North Dakota battlefields, the National Park Service wrote, “Each of North Dakota’s battlefields remains a good candidate for comprehensive preservation, but Killdeer Mountain is most at-risk. While exploratory oil well drilling has had little effect on the battlefield’s condition so far, industrial scale extraction of the sub-surface resources at Killdeer Mountain could destroy the landscape and associated view-sheds in the near future.”
Killdeer Mountain was the site of an attack by U.S. Army Brigadier General Alfred Sully against a traditional summer gathering of American Indians for trading, socializing and ceremonies. On July 28 and 29, 1864, the general’s troops killed an estimated 150 Dakota and Lakota warriors and executed uncounted women and children. They destroyed as many as 1,800 lodges, 200 tons of buffalo meat and dried berries, clothes and household utensils, tipi poles, travois, and piles of tanned hides and slaughtered horses and perhaps 3,000 dogs. It was the final significant battle in the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862, but its deliberate brutality led to other conflicts. Among the survivors of the Battle of Killdeer Mountain were Sitting Bull and his lieutenant, Gall, who would fight again at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876.
The mountain was a sacred site long before the battle. Dakota Goodhouse, an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, says, “Killdeer Mountain is a place people still go to pray, [and there are] still people at Fort Berthold who visit the site for vision quests.”
Gerard Baker, an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes and a former National Park Service superintendant, is 59. As a child, he learned the ceremonial importance of Taĥċa Wakutėpi from his father, who learned it from tribal elders. “He told us the stories of Singing Butte, where Earth-naming ceremonies once took place. Many of the ceremonies are lost because of time, but they are still extremely important. Medicine Hole is associated with lost ceremonies. Many were lost during the smallpox epidemic of 1837.” Baker explains that unless a ceremony’s owner sells or gives away the ceremony before he dies, it can no longer be performed. So many Indians died so quickly during the smallpox epidemic that they did not have time to ensure the survival of their ceremonies.
Sioux leader Sitting Bull, left, and Hunkpapa Chief Gall survived the Battle of Killdeer Mountain. (AP; Courtesy National Archives)
But the spirits still live on Singing Butte. “The spirits live in different areas throughout the Dakotas in various buttes from Canada to the South Dakota line. The Hidatsa consider that their ancestral territory,” says Baker. Other lifeways that once took place on Killdeer Mountain included burials, fasting, trapping to get eagle feathers, deer-hunting and dressing.
A fundamental problem—and one of the challenges in opposing oil drilling on the mountain—says Baker, is that “not enough people know about the ceremonies. Even though people know the site is sacred, not so many know about the ceremonies.” He has a very pragmatic approach to dealing with Hess’s current oil drilling proposals. “I wish we could say ‘No drilling,’ but that’s not going to happen. They’re going to get that oil one way or the other.… We could hold up protest signs, but I think education would work better,” says Goodhouse. “I feel the issue is people don’t care because they don’t know” about Killdeer Mountain’s cultural or historical significance. “In an ideal world, there would be no wells near that area, but I have to be a realist. My suggestion is to drill laterally” for four miles, instead of the two miles of lateral drilling Hess is planning.
Opponents have won two concessions. “They have agreed that if they come across artifacts they will cease operations. But I know from experience that road companies do not stop development to save what’s there. They call in salvage archaeologists to survey,” says Goodhouse.
Richard Rothaus, president of Trefoil Cultural and Environmental, an archaeological consulting firm, had been planning to look at the Killdeer battlefield in 2014 or 2015, but when he heard about the imminent oil drilling there, he got permission to do a quick surface survey. He found three sites, two of them major. “This is an area that could have good, important information about the battle. It would be a shame to see it torn up without some work.”
Rothaus says he would need one excavation season, roughly one summer, to do 80 percent of the archaeological work that needs to be done at the battlefield. He has applied for funding for the work to the National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program and will know in July whether the money will come through.
According to Rothaus, “Oil development is growing so fast out there that no one can keep track of it. People didn’t know this was being leased,” so they couldn’t do the archaeological work earlier. “Hess says it avoided the battlefield, but is 2.5 miles away from the historical marker for the battlefield, not three miles away from the battlefield.” The marker, he says, occupies just a couple of square feet of the vast battlefield. The wells Hess proposes are within the battlefield area.
The current situation on Killdeer Mountain, says Rothaus, came about through “a series of fairly innocent mistakes. I’ve almost never encountered anyone who doesn’t care about this history, but the right people are not at the table.”
Anne Marguerite Coyle, assistant professor of biology at Jamestown College in Jamestown, North Dakota, who spent three years studying golden eagles on Killdeer Mountain, concurs with Rothaus. “People don’t know when a plot of land might come up for lease.” The North Dakota Industrial Commission, she says, has no obligation to call other state agencies when they are planning to sell oil and gas leases.
Hess has agreed to a second concession, says Goodhouse. “The community did not want wells to be drilled during the school year because of the increased traffic, so they agreed to drill them in July.” But this concession brings its own problems. “The time they are going to put in the wells conflicts
Sully led the 1864 assault on a summer gathering of tribes at Killdeer. (Joel Emmons Whitney)
with religious pilgrimages to area. If someone went to pray up there this summer, drilling would have an adverse effect, based on the impacts I saw of drilling at Bear Butte. There the development is five to 10 miles away from the sacred site. The dirt roads there were expanded to accommodate additional traffic. The traffic is heavy, loud and constant—not conducive to a vision quest.”
Goodhouse says a January meeting between the Mineral Resources Department and those with concerns about the drilling was “very civil, very cordial,” but whether education and goodwill can lead to other compromises is doubtful. Hess responded to a request to ICTMN’s request for an interview via e-mail: “Throughout the regulatory process, members of the community have had an opportunity to raise their concerns with the North Dakota Industrial Commission. We believe that the commission remains the best forum for concerns to be raised and addressed.”
Loren Jepson, a landowner on Killdeer Mountain, cattle rancher and former Hess employee, did raise the issue with the commission when he filed a petition in February asking the commission to suspend its order to allow the drilling and to rehear the case. The commission denied Jepson’s petition on February 20. One argument he made—in keeping with his intent to slow down the process in order to allow more time for study and compromise—was that the commission “failed to consider the best alternative of drilling the requested wells,” referring to the concept that the wells could be started further away from the battlefield. The commission found: “What Jepson has characterized as the failure to consider ‘the best alternative’ does not constitute grounds for rehearing or reconsideration.” In order to reopen the case, says Alison Ritter, spokeswoman for the commission’s Division of Mineral Resources, new information would have to be brought forward. “The commission carefully weighed the evidence,” she says, and the case has already been reopened once, last fall, which does not happen often.
Hess began preliminary work on the site one-quarter mile from Jepson’s house on February 21. He says an archaeologist is on site, but since the work moves so quickly and so much is destroyed in the process, it was unlikely anything would be found, an assessment Rothaus confirms. “Monitoring is just the last safeguard, not where you would want to start an archaeological investigation.”
Ritter explains that Jepson has run through his options at the executive level of the North Dakota state government and his next move would be to file an appeal in district court. Jepson says he does not know whether he will appeal. His attorney has told him that he would need $20,000 just to begin the process.
“I’m 60 years old,” Jepson says. “There are 30 [oil] wells here now and there will be 90 before the end of summer. I will never see the end of this. A way of life is gone, and it won’t come back.”
No injuries reported when Empire Builder derails in Everett
By Sharon Salyer, The Herald
Doug Ramsay / For the Herald Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Amtrak officials examine the last two coaches of the Chicago to Seattle Empire Builder that derailed just north of Howarth Park in Everett on Sunday morning. There were no injuries in the derailment and passengers from the derailed cars were moved to the front cars as the train continued to Seattle with the two derailed cars being left behind.
An Amtrak train traveling from Chicago to Seattle was hit by a mudslide near Howarth Park in Everett on Sunday morning, derailing the last three passengers cars, which tilted but remained upright.
No injuries were reported among the 86 passengers and 11 crew members, an Amtrak spokesman said.
Three rail cars remained blocking the tracks. The rest of the train was decoupled and continued on to Mukilteo to discharge passengers, Rick Robinson, fire marshal for the Everett Fire Department. Passengers were bused to Seattle.
Sound Transit announced Sunday on its website that Sounder service was cancelled for Monday and Tuesday. Amtrak also said its train service would be affected between Vancouver, B.C., and Portland, Ore., until after Tuesday, with passengers being taken by bus.
After earlier slides this winter passenger trains have been barred from the tracks for 48 hours after a slide.
The tracks between Seattle and Everett have been plagued with slides in recent months.
“We’ve had more than 200 slides this past winter and spring,” said Gus Melonas, spokesman for Burlington Northern Santa Fe, which owns the tracks.
The landslide occurred about 8:30 a.m., affecting two coach cars and the train’s dining car.
The slide was triggered about 100 feet up a 200-foot cliff, depositing a patch of dirt and debris 15 feet deep and 30 feet wide along the tracks a quarter-mile north of Howarth Park, Melonas said.
The force of the slide was enough to “tip the rails over, not the cars, just the rails,” Robinson said.
Two ladder trucks, three engine trucks and two medic units were dispatched to the scene.
About one-quarter mile of track needed to be realigned with the repairs expected to be completed by Monday morning, Melonas said. No estimate of the cost to repair the track was immediately available.
The slide affected the inner line of two main rail lines. However, freight train traffic was not disrupted and two freight trains moved through the area Sunday afternoon, Melonas said.
No greater sin than inflicting misery and pain on a child.
The darkness, when God seems silent, fell on Chantel Craig, a 19-month Tulalip girl and her 3-year-old sister. Chantel died, her sister survived. Last October, they sat strapped in their car seats like victims of a plane crash, abandoned by their drug-addled mother, festering in a derelict vehicle for days.
Agony has a face. Chantel was “severely malnourished” according to the postmortem. She was blanketed by lice, urine, bed bugs, feces and “a bleeding rash.” Her mom has been charged with murder.
Chantel’s death, according to the Snohomish County Medical Examiner, was neglect. And “neglect” is the operative word. Chantel and her sister fell away from social workers, social workers freighted by heavy case loads but laboring to do the right thing. They slipped through the latticework of state and tribal oversight.
Now the state and the Tulalip Tribes need to work in common cause, to address communication misfires, and to embrace solutions with teeth.
The Herald’s Diana Hefley served as an official observer of the Child Fatality Review, the investigation and report on Chantel’s death, conducted by the Department of Social and Health Services’ Children Administration. Her reporting crystallized the tragedy.
“They were asked to inspect the net,” Hefley writes. “Maybe it can be woven tighter so another little girl won’t fall through, dying before she learns to twirl on tiptoes or color inside the lines or dream of being a princess or a firefighter.”
The fatality review produced four findings and three recommendations that demand action. Priority one is to delineate specific social worker responsibilities in the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the Tulalip Tribes and DSHS Children’s Administration. Tribal and state employees navigate the MOU’s vague language like a United Nations compact. Elastic wording doesn’t help case workers who need to know their specific role.
The MOU is authorized by the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 to oversee the custody and care of Indian children. The act is a window on a tainted legacy, when the United States regularly removed Indian children from their homes and traditional culture.
The review’s second and third recommendations are manageable. Retaining and hiring more Child Protective Services workers is doable with additional funding from the Legislature. CPS workers are committed and professional. In Chantel’s case, they didn’t have the resources for critical follow-through, however.
As the second finding highlights, the committee was concerned about the “lack of documented attempts to locate the family” for six months, from December 2011 to May 2012.
Active cases require a monthly review by a supervisor. There is no documentation that any reviews occurred between May 7, 2012, and Oct. 8 the same year. Are revolving-door supervisors to blame? The Children’s Administration might consider an administrative bucket for overworked CPS workers to send follow-ups that can’t be met (with no penalty for acknowledging they simply don’t have time.) Another CPS worker would be assigned to help. The Catch-22 is this approach might disrupt continuity, a concern the committee underlined when supervisory coverage changes.
Bureaucracies are soulless, social workers are not. To make the Chantel Craig tragedy right presupposes that human nature, including the menace of drugs and child abuse, is tractable. It isn’t. So we begin changing what we can, starting with the fatality review’s recommendations. Chantel deserves as much.
Exercise through sport or dancing to stay healthy. (J. Morgan Edwards Photography)
Source: Indian Country Today Media Network
April 7, 2013 is World Health Day. As part of the movement to promote healthy living, what steps will you take to stay healthy and cancer-free?
The American Cancer Society has five easy suggestions that will help keep you healthier and reduce your risk of cancer at the same time.
Get off the couch and get on the treadmill. Or on the stair stepper. Or on the elliptical. Whatever the case, get active! Now that Spring is finally here, you don’t have an excuse. Grab a loved one and go for a nice evening walk outside. The American Cancer Society recommends a minimum of 30 minutes of exercise daily for adults, so get moving!
Eating fresh produce regularly may reduce your risk of cancer.
Avoid drinking in excess. If you drink, limit alcohol to one drink per day for women and two drinks per day for men. The American Cancer Society has found that drinking damages body tissue and increases the risk of cancer. Is the extra drink really worth the risk?
Watch your waistband. Arlene St. John Black Bird, program director for the Breast & Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program (BCCEDP) at Cheyenne River Health Center in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, offers some dietary advice: “Research shows that poor diet is strongly linked to cancer. To stay healthy, limit red meat and avoid processed meat. Instead, try lean proteins like chicken or turkey. Making small changes to your diet can actually make a big difference.”
Get regular cancer screenings. If you have a family history of cancer, you should talk to your doctor about getting screened at an early age. Statistics show that early detection saves lives.
Be tobacco free. Tobacco use accounts for at least 30 percent of all cancer deaths and 87 percent of lung cancer deaths. By smoking, you’re not only putting yourself at risk—you’re also jeopardizing your loved ones. Each year, about 3,400 non-smoking adults die of lung cancer as a result of breathing secondhand smoke. Quit today and keep yourself and your loved ones cancer-free.
Did you know that 2/3 of all cancers are preventable? That means following the American Cancer Society’s guidelines will reduce your risk of cancer and, potentially, save your life.
With statistics like that, it seems like a no-brainer: This World Health Day, commit to healthy living.
For more healthy living suggestions, contact the American Cancer Society at 1.800.227.2345 or www.cancer.org.
Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery poses a photographic puzzle with “Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty,’ a wide-ranging show exploring cultural attitudes about beauty, running through Sept. 1, 2013.
By Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times
Frank A. Rinehart “Hattie Tom, Apache” (1899), platinum print
What is beauty? How do concepts of beauty change? And who possesses beauty — those who observe it or those who are observed?
These are among the questions raised in “Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty,” a new exhibit at the Henry Art Gallery, curated by Deborah Willis, the first scholar to take part in the Henry’s new Visiting Fellow Program.
Willis is a historian of African-American photography who teaches at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she serves as professor and chair of photography and imaging. A few years ago, the Henry invited her to pore through its holdings and those of the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, with the idea of exploring “different attitudes about and cultural interpretations of beauty.”
“Out [o] Fashion Photography” is the result. It’s a big show that weighs how men photograph women, how women photograph men, how photographers turn their lenses on members of the own sex or people of other races, and, finally, how some artists — Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, the amazing Janieta Eyre — translate themselves into the most unlikely photographic icons.
As the exhibit’s punning title suggests, it deals with how ideals of beauty can go out of style, while also acknowledging the role fashion has played in shaping our concept of beauty. Wildly diverse in content, it asks viewers to draw their own connections more than it spells anything out for them.
Willis has divided it into three “thematic groupings,” although she cautions in her catalog essay that “there is overlap throughout, and many images can be discussed in multiple categories.”
If that sounds vague to the point of being unhelpful, it is.
The exhibit is better approached as a free-associative romp through the Henry/UW collections by someone with a curious eye. One question that gets raised again and again, in all three sections, is: Who is exploiting whom in the photographic process?
Willis starts off with works by Edward S. Curtis, whose passion about documenting vanishing Native American cultures may have overridden a more personal connection between the photographer and his subject.
Still, Curtis’ “Two Moons — Cheyenne” (1910) is a fine thing to behold, catching the essence of the war chief’s proud, weathered character. Frank A. Rinehart’s “Hattie Tom, Apache” (1899) tells a different story: The look of skepticism the young woman levels at the camera is withering.
Honest portraiture is one thing. Voyeurism is another.
The voyeuristic norm — of a male eye trained on a female form for purposes of arousal — seems most vividly and straightforwardly represented by E.J. Bellocq’s “Storyville Portrait” (c. 1912). But in other works, things get more complicated.
Don Wallen’s “Untitled” (1976), with its live female nude draped around a plastic-white mannequin, seems to comment on how synthetic some ideals of female beauty can be. Harry Callahan’s gorgeous silhouette shot of his wife, “Eleanor” (1948), uses photographic artifice to create something intimate, loving and mysterious.
Willis includes some actual fashion photography, including items by Hans L. Jorgensen and Irving Penn, where women are idealized by the camera, surely with their own full cooperation. And in shots of famous actresses — Cecil Beaton’s “Marlene Dietrich” (1930) and Benjamin J. Falk’s “Portrait of Miss Rush, the Actress” (c. 1892/1897) — there’s little doubt that the models are shaping their own images as much as the photographer is. “Miss Rush,” in her bow-tie, jacket, vest and trousers, is a dapper gender-bender. Dietrich, here, is in pure glamour-queen mode.
The male figure, if a bit underrepresented, isn’t neglected in “Out [o] Fashion.”
Jack Pierson’s gauzy “Belvedere Clayton” (1992) portrays a dreamy young man, swaddled in a nightshirt, sprawled back in bed and gazing at the camera. There’s something so swooning and heady about his pose that he seems made of gossamer. George Dureau’s black male nude, “Glen Thompson, Rear” (1983), on the other hand, couldn’t be more directly carnal.
In some cases, subjects’ actions, more than their looks, lend a true hypnotic allure to their images. That’s the case with Lewis Wickes Hine’s “Powerhouse Mechanic” (1921) and Barbara Morgan’s “Martha Graham — Letter to the World” (1940), which are slyly juxtaposed in the show.
There’s fine work here that seemingly has nothing to do with Willis’ chosen theme. Weegee’s masterpiece “The Critic” (1943), in which a Bowery character snarls at two preening operagoers, is surely less about beauty than hostilities between two social worlds, while Lisette Model’s “Famous Gambler, Nice” (1934) comes off as a pure character study, with little thought about the attractiveness of its subject (although the photograph itself is certainly handsomely composed).
Diane Arbus’ “A Woman in a Bird Mask, N.Y.C.” (1967) delights in how artifice can triumph over age and take a turn for the beautiful-fantastical. But in Arbus’ “A Family on Their Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, New York” (1968), it’s the total disconnect between husband, wife and child that rivets you far more than the incidental detail of the sunbathing mom’s classic, brittle 1960s looks.
Some of these puzzling inclusions might benefit from more commentary by Willis on individual photographs. Without that, the exhibition is mostly what you choose to make of it.
One thing for sure: There are plenty of photographic riches here — including work by Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Edward J. Steichen and many others — to make something from.
“Our tribal leadership’s main responsibility is simply to protect our people,” said Marc Gauthier, a representative of the Upper Columbia United Tribes, before leaving the meeting. “It comes down to that basic human desire to protect your family.”
The Washington State Department of Ecology has known since the 1990s that its water-pollution limits have meant some Washingtonians regularly consume dangerous amounts of toxic chemicals in fish from local waterways.
At least twice, Ecology has been told by its overseers at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to fix the problem and better protect people’s health. Ecology was close to finally doing that last year — until Boeing and other business interests launched an intense lobbying campaign aimed not just at Ecology but also at the Washington Legislature and then-Gov. Christine Gregoire. That is the picture that emerges from recent interviews as well as government documents obtained by InvestigateWest under the Washington Public Records Law.
The problem lies in Ecology’s estimate of how much fish people eat. The lower the amount, the more water pollution Ecology can legally allow. So by assuming that people eat the equivalent of just one fish meal per month, Ecology is able to set less stringent pollution limits.
Meanwhile, citing the health benefits of fish, the state Department of Health advises people to eat fish twice a week, eight times as often as the official estimate of actual consumption. The state knows that some members of Indian tribes, immigrants and other fishermen consume locally caught seafood even more often than that and are therefore at greater risk of cancer, neurological damage and other maladies.
The Boeing Co. looms large in this story. In June 2012, Boeing said if Ecology went ahead with plans to make fish safer to eat, it would “cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars and severely hamper its ability to increase production in Renton and make future expansion elsewhere in the state cost prohibitive,” according to a Gregoire aide’s reconstruction of a conversation with a Boeing executive that month.
In July 2012, Ecology announced it would not go forward with a new rule to adjust the fish-eating estimate as planned. Instead the agency launched a “stakeholder process” that would delay any new rules for at least two years. Last week that process plodded on in Spokane, where state and local government officials and others spent more than three hours discussing the many contaminants that for years have prompted official state warnings against eating Washington fish too regularly.
“All we’ve seen is delay,” said Bart Mihailovich of the Spokane Riverkeeper environmental group, one of several that have refused to participate in the new series of meetings. “Why are we going back and doing what was already done?”
At the meeting in Spokane Thursday, a representative of Indian tribes called Ecology’s conduct “a betrayal” and explained that the tribes are boycotting the current process because it is unnecessary.
“Our tribal leadership’s main responsibility is simply to protect our people,” said Marc Gauthier, a representative of the Upper Columbia United Tribes, before leaving the meeting. “It comes down to that basic human desire to protect your family.”
Ecology had at least one other false start in fixing the rules, back in the mid-1990s, an effort that petered out even before a rule change was proposed, said Melissa Gildersleeve, the Ecology manager overseeing the current stakeholder process. That followed a 1994 study by the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission that documented how the national estimate of one fish meal per month was greatly and regularly exceeded by some members of Indian tribes.
While who eats how much contaminated fish is a slippery and much-debated corner of science, few of the parties involved in the current dispute in Washington contend that the current fish-consumption rate accurately reflects the true amount eaten, especially by some groups such as members of Indian tribes, subsistence fishermen and immigrants. The figure came from a 1973-74 federal study that asked consumers to fill our “food diaries” for three days, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
As of April 1, Inuktitut became an official language of Nunavut, putting it on par with English and French in the territory.
“This level of statutory protection for an aboriginal language is unprecedented in Canada,” said the Government of Nunavut’s Department of Culture and Heritage in an April 2 news release.
The passage of the Official Languages Act has been five years in the making. This act takes the place of the Northwest Territories Official Languages Act, which recognized only English and French as official languages. The older act did give “a lesser set of rights to seven aboriginal languages, including Inuktitut,” according to Uqausivut, a comprehensive language plan. But, as the plan points out, “This does not reflect the realities of Nunavut, where a majority of people speak neither English nor French as their first language, but a single Aboriginal language.”
To help support public agencies in becoming compliant with the new act, the Department of Culture and Heritage will provide $5 million for Inuit language initiatives.
“I am proud that Inuit in Nunavut now have a clear statement of their inherent right to the use of the Inuit language in full equality with English and French,” said James Arreak, Minister of Languages, in the press release.
By Jack McNeel, Indian Country Today Media Network
There are no tipis, no horse parades, no trailers selling frybread. There’s not even any grass or dirt, but there’s no question that this is a pow wow—an important, meaningful pow wow. The smiles on the faces of the inmates, the laughter, the hugs and kisses, the families mixing freely with the prisoners—all this makes you momentarily forget that you are in a Washington state prison, in a large concrete room, surrounded by iron bars and razor wire.
What made the 2012 pow wow even better than the previous year’s is the kids, who were for the first time allowed to attend. The printed program provided at Airway Heights Corrections Center says: “This ceremony is dedicated to the shorties. We love you.”
In 2010 the state of Washington removed various traditional practices and religious rights from Native inmates because of budget constraints. One of those was access to pow wows. Some of those rights were reinstated in 2011, thanks to the work of tribal leaders and tribal lawyers. Common sense also prevailed, with people recognizing that the rehabilitation of inmates would be enhanced if these religious and cultural practices were permitted.
The Pacific Islanders bring the noise at Coyote Ridge Corrections Center. (Jack McNeel)
A new organization was formed to help Native prisoners receive better opportunities for cultural and religious activities aimed at rehabilitation. It’s called Huy, from a Coast Salish word meaning “See you again / We never say good-bye.” Gabriel S. Galanda, chairman of the board for that group, says, “Our imprisoned relatives are virtually forgotten, even by tribal communities. Huy intends to keep them in our hearts and minds, and to improve their tribal ways of life behind bars.
Minty LongEarth, an enrolled Santee Indian Nation of South Carolina tribal member, is the Native American Religious Services program director with the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation in Seattle. She basically oversees all the prison pow wows throughout the state. “There are 12 Washington prisons and at those 12 there are 20 Native circles,” she said.
An inmate from Montana who is a member of the Gros Ventre Tribe is at Airway Heights Corrections Center. He is grateful that someone had brought the pow wow back to his prison. “It’s a beautiful thing—all of us gathered together,” he says. “It’s a gathering of all our family, loved ones.… We’re one family, one circle. We dance and we sing and we pray and everything comes together.”
His nephew grabs a bite of food as his mother adjusts his regalia. He then joins his uncle in the dance area, moving to the beat of the drum, very much at ease despite the prison’s concrete walls. “It’s sharing,” he says. “Sharing gifts, stories, meeting new people, new tribes, different nations, different people. I take this walk seriously, this red road seriously. I’m a true believer in everything—the sweat lodge, pow wow, anything sacred.
“I had to come to prison, but prison isn’t always a bad thing. There’s good that comes with it—like this. It helps me get through the year. It’s the happiest I’ve been for a while. I can’t thank the Creator enough for this time and opportunity to be with my family and share this moment. I carry this deep within my soul, my heart, my spirit.”
Another inmate, from Fort Peck, Montana, also treasures the pow wows. “You can’t really put into words how much this means to us,” he says. “It’s the one day of the year that we’re able to show our families we’re better than what they saw us out there doing. Today was the first time that I’ve seen so many grown men in here shed a tear—[that happened] when they saw the little shorties out there dancing.” He says he still has a long time left on his sentence, 25 years, but, “this will help me get through the whole next year. Right after today we’ll start planning and looking forward to the next one.”
Joseph Luce, the chaplain at Airway Heights, also praises the monthly opportunities for Native inmates to engage in cultural activities: “Once a week they get to go out to the sweat lodge area. Twice a month they’ll sweat. The weeks they’re not sweating, they’ll go out and do a pipe ceremony outside. Once a week they’ll be drumming. They get together on average a couple times a week. We also offer special classes to work on drum skills and work on beading skills.”
The pow wow at the Coyote Ridge prison has a slightly different feel from the one at Airway Heights. Security seems a little tighter, but the smiles are equally broad and the drums equally busy.
“These kids coming to prison now are getting younger and younger,” says one inmate who has spent many years in prison. “How are we going to change that cycle? Inside prison, through this program, we’re able to bring up the younger kids, the 18-, 19- and 20-year-old kids and change their lives around by giving them a tool, by giving them a skill. Having them interact with United Indians of All Tribes. Just maybe through that collaboration they’ll be able to get some kind of help when they do get out.
“This is the biggest event of the year for the prison,” he says. “Without this event, life would really suck. This is a really happy event. You see all the men with smiles on their face. There’s a lot of unity here. Unfortunately, in the cells, that unity isn’t there. Here we come together as a family, as a fellowship. We can look at each other and think, That‘s my brother, my friend. This is almost like being free.”
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