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To honor Chantel’s memory

In Our View: Lessons of a preventable tragedy, The Herald Editorial, www.heraldnet.com

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.

World Health Day: What Steps Will You Take to Stay Healthy and Cancer-Free?

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.

Henry’s ‘Out [o] Fashion’ exhibit takes boundaries off beauty

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

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.

Business interests trump health concerns in fish consumption fight

“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.”

By Robert McClure
March 30, 2013

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.

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.

Read full article here

Aboriginal Language Gets Official Status in Nunavut, Canada

Source: Indian Country today Media Network

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.

Washington’s Prison Pow Wows Are Good for Inmates and Their Families

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.”

Environmentalists signal they’ll sue BNSF over coal dust

The Sierra Club and four other environmental groups Tuesday said they intend to file a federal lawsuit to force BNSF Railway and six coal companies to better contain the coal being shipped in open-topped trains.

By Hal Bernton

In a legal notice sent to the companies, the environmental groups contend that the trains are spewing coal dust and chunks of debris into the Columbia River, the Lake Washington Ship Canal and other Northwest waterways in violation of the federal Clean Water Act.

The legal challenge comes as environmental groups are campaigning against proposals to build new coal-export terminals in Washington and Oregon that would greatly increase the amount of coal trains moving through the Northwest.

“This action today seeks to stop illegal pollution and keep our river free of dirty coal,” said Brett VandenHeuvel, executive director of the Columbia Riverkeeper. “The threat of coal export makes this lawsuit even timelier.”

Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, Friends of the Columbia Gorge and RE Sources for Sustainable Communities also signed on to the intent-to-sue letter.

In a statement released Tuesday, BNSF said that the railroad has ”safely hauled coal in Washington for decades. Yet despite the movement of so much coal over such a long period of time, we were not aware of a single coal dust complaint lodged with a state agency in the Northwest or with the railroad until the recent interest in coal export terminals.”

“This is nothing more than the threat of a nuisance lawsuit without merit, that is part of an ongoing campaign to designed to create headlines to influence the review process for proposed export terminals,” the statement said.

In Washington state, major new export terminals are proposed for Longview and Cherry Point near Bellingham to send Montana and Wyoming coal to Asian markets. Some coal already is being shipped through Washington for export from British Columbia, and some is shipped to coal-fired plant near Centralia.

That legal notice was accompanied by a listing of more than 20 sites in Washington where coal has spilled since the beginning of 2011.

The document also includes photographs that depict coal dust blowing off a train as it passes along the Columbia River near Horsethief Lake. They also show what appear to be nuggets or chunks of coal at other locations, including near the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Seattle.

In a teleconference with reporters, several Washington residents spoke about their experiences with coal from the trains. Don McDermott, of Dallesport, Klickitat County, says that coal dust has blown off the trains and settled on his grapevines that grow beside the railroad track in a fish pond.

“My primary concern is that there is trespass on my property,” McDermott said. “The railroads need to contain their loads. The shippers need to contain their loads.”

The legal notice by environmental groups cited industry studies that indicated from 250 to 700 pounds of coal were lost from each rail car during transport.

Courtney Wallace, the BNSF spokeswoman, said that past studies were rough estimates, and indicated the coal losses fluctuated, primarily while the trains were within the Powder River Basin in southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming.

She said the studies were done before 2011, when new regulations to reduce coal dust were put in place.

Wallace says the new coal-loading rules require shippers to take added measures to address coal loss, including putting chemicals known as “topper agents” on the coal that reduce most of the coal-dust loss.

The chemicals also have stirred some concern.

In a Jan. 22 letter to agencies that will prepare the environmental-impact statement for the proposed Cherry Point terminal, the Washington Department of Natural Resources notes that one of these chemicals used in cleaning up the 2010 Gulf Oil spill has “been implicated in subsequent fish and shellfish deformities.”

Offensive? Jeremy Scott And Adidas Debut “Native American” Tracksuits

Source: Fast Co Design, www.fastcodesign.com

The Kansas-born designer is back with a new collection of Adidas collaboration threads, including several that reappropriate Native American iconography.

Controversy is Jeremy Scott’s thing; you may remember Co.Design’s coverage of his Adidas shackle sneakers, which braced wearer’s ankles with chains. “In retrospect,” wrote Mark Wilson, “they weren’t such a fantastic idea.” Last month, Scott unveiled his 2013 Adidas Originals collection, and while it’s not all easy punchlines about race and ethnicity, many critics are up in arms about several garments that borrow from Pacific Northwest Native American traditions.

Scott’s thing is parroting genres and subgenres–which usually results in some pretty awesome hybrid garments. Take a peek at the lookbook and see how many distinct cultural sects you can count. I got to five, at least. Scott gives nods to late ’70s British skinheads, ’80s urban streetwear, and ’90s raver culture, to name just a few.

The 2013 collection stumbles into some problematic territory when it comes to a series of tracksuits, shoes, and dresses decorated with cartoon renderings of Pacific Northwest Native American carvings–what some bloggers are calling “totem pole print.” Totems originated as a way for some First Nation groups along the Pacific coast to honor their ancestors, describe legends, and sometimes, memorialize the dead. Scott’s simplified the symbology and tacked them onto dresses, tracksuits, and sneakers.

Curious what those in the Native community would think, I reached out to Jessica Metcalfe, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa who is a professor of Native American art, fashion, and design. As it turns out, she’d already seen the designs and written a post about them. “Misappropriations like this one are bad, unethical, and in some cases illegal,” she told me. “Bizarre, garish, unpleasant and disgusting were several terms used to describe this outfit by people in the Native American community. Several individuals noticed that his inspiration was unoriginal, and that his take on Northwest Coast formline was ignorant, disrespectful and badly construed (in other words, Scott needs to work on his ovoids and u-forms).”

More than that, Metcalfe explains, they devalue the meaning and quality of the original source material. “When companies like Forever 21, Urban Outfitters, or Adidas put out tacky images like this, they perpetuate the idea that Native American people have no sense of ownership or artistic legacy when it comes to our art, and anyone can steal it, tack their name on it, and make a buck–all the while putting forward the idea that our art is ugly and cheap,” she says.

After mulling over these images for a bit, I wondered if there’s a “right” way to do this. Metcalfe thinks so–after all, she’s built a business mindfully promoting Native designers through her blog and online shop, Beyond Buckskin. For the prolific and often very funny Scott, it seems like a missed opportunity: Why not make this a joint effort with the First Nation artists? I’m willing to bet that the fruits of that collaboration would’ve been super interesting. Instead, we get a cartoon version of a tradition that goes back hundreds of years. Even divorced from its historical underpinnings, it’s just sort of. . .lazy.

Whether you agree with critics or not, it seems that Adidas wants to keep these from American eyes–these pieces won’t be available in the United States. Check out the full collection and judge for yourself here.

Yakamas urge feds to consider horse slaughter

By Shannon Dininny, The Associated Press

YAKIMA — A Northwest Indian tribe urged federal officials to explain their position against slaughtering horses in the United States, calling it “absurd” to prohibit the practice.

The question of equine slaughter has been a hot-button issue in the West, where horses hold an iconic role as loyal companions. Animal welfare groups have expressed outrage at the idea of resuming domestic slaughter, which Congress effectively banned in 2006 by cutting funding for federal inspection programs. Others, including some animal welfare groups, contend the ban has resulted in increased horse abuse and abandonment and booming wild horse populations on state, federal and tribal lands.

No group is perhaps more affected by the matter than the Yakama Nation, a Washington tribe with an estimated 12,000 wild horses roaming across its sprawling reservation in the arid, south-central part of the state, Yakama Nation Chairman Harry Smiskin said in a March 29 letter to President Barack Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

“We don’t understand why it is OK to slaughter many animals in this country — certainly the White House and the USDA have meat on their cafeteria menus every day — but for some reason horses are considered sacrosanct,” Smiskin wrote. “We should not manage these horses based on purely emotional arguments, story books or movies we all saw as children.”

Smiskin argued the market for horse meat in other parts of the world, as well as the United States before World War II, could create jobs, humanely reduce overpopulated herds and feeds others, adding “it is absurd to prohibit it.”

Smiskin declined to talk about the letter in a telephone interview Monday.

Congress lifted the slaughter ban in a spending bill the president signed into law in November. Now the USDA is preparing to inspect a southern New Mexico meat company that has been fighting for more than a year for approval to convert its former cattle slaughter operation into a horse slaughterhouse.

Valley Meat Co. sued the USDA last year to resume the inspections, and the agency said last month it had no choice legally but to move forward with the application, as well as several others. However, the Obama administration threw a new twist into the more than yearlong debate with a statement urging Congress to reinstate the ban.

Several Northwest tribes have joined together in support of opening a horse slaughterhouse in the region to address booming wild horse populations on their reservations. The Yakama and Colville tribes in Washington, the Umatilla and Warm Springs tribes in Oregon, and Shoshone Bannock in Idaho say the horses destroy medicinal plants and damage habitat for other species.

———

Associated Press writer Jeri Clausing contributed to this story from Albuquerque, N.M.

Standing tall for the fallen

A retired Marine’s journey aims to raise awareness for those wounded in war

Mark Mulligan / The HeraldChuck Lewis, a Marine Corps veteran living in Ronan, Mont., walks eastbound down U.S. 2morning toward Gold Bar on Monday, the second day of a 3,300 mile, 6-month journey across the U.S. — Mark Mulligan / The Herald
Chuck Lewis, a Marine Corps veteran living in Ronan, Mont., walks eastbound down U.S. 2morning toward Gold Bar on Monday, the second day of a 3,300 mile, 6-month journey across the U.S.

By Gale Fiege, The Herald

STARTUP — Retired Marine Corps Sgt. Chuck Lewis is walking for the fallen.

U.S. soldiers, sailors and Marines killed in war or those who returned with physical and mental disabilities are the focus of his cross-country campaign.

Lewis is committed to walk 3,300 miles from Everett to Washington, D.C., during the next six months to raise money and awareness for programs that help military veterans.

Lewis, 62, from Ronan, Mont., began his patriotic journey Easter morning at Legion Park in Everett where Bill Quistorf, an Army veteran who lives near the park, shook his hand. Lewis said goodbye to his wife and daughters and started walking down Marine View Drive to Hewitt Avenue headed to U.S. 2.

He won’t see his wife again until he reaches Kalispell, Mont. They’ll have another reunion in Dubuque, Iowa, and she plans to meet him in late September when he finishes at the Vietnam Memorial in the nation’s capital. Hoping to walk 25 miles a day, Lewis plans to reach Chicago, dip down to North Carolina and then up to Washington, D.C.

Lewis, a Vietnam veteran and retired electrical engineer, is pushing a flag-decorated cart loaded with a tent, a sleeping bag, clothes for any weather condition, a second pair of shoes and a solar panel to power his iPhone, which is interfaced with a SPOT global positioning system that allows his supporters to track his progress online.

He spent Sunday night at the Sultan Firehouse, where firefighters Steve Tonkin, Michelle Fox and Andrew Lowry decided to take Lewis out for supper.

“He’s got a long way to go, so we wanted to give him a good start,” said Tonkin, 47. “Chuck’s a good guy. I’m a veteran, too, so what he’s doing hits home in several ways.”

Though he was prepared for chilly rain, Lewis donned a pair of athletic shorts and a T-shirt Monday morning to continue his spring walk along U.S. 2 in the Skykomish River valley.

In Startup, Lewis wondered aloud if this was the community where he would begin to see some elevation gain.

“Is this where I start going up? I see the mountains ahead,” Lewis joked. “I already have a blister, but I’ve run 100-mile races and I’m prepared.”

While taking a break, Lewis told a story about two Marine Corps veterans who returned to Ronan last year from combat duty in Afghanistan. One came home missing his legs. The other killed himself three weeks later.

“In the military, these guys have a purpose and people who have their backs. When they get home, everybody is busy, so they have nobody to talk to. The economy is poor and they can’t find a job,” Lewis said. “I probably can’t help too many of these guys personally, but I can raise awareness and money for the programs that can.”

Lewis waves to the drivers who honk their horns. Occasionally people stop him to ask about his journey.

The side of his cart is decorated with a thermometer graphic that shows how much Lewis has raised for veterans. His goal is $50,000, but he has a second thermometer ready to go should people donate more.

Lewis invites people to walk with him through their towns. If anyone asks, he is able to give a presentation about his trip. He also welcomes help with places to sleep, shower and wash clothes.

To offer such help to Lewis and donate to the cause, go to www.walkingforthefallen.com.