ER visits dropped 10 percent in teh last fiscal year, due in part to a set of best practices around emergency room care, says a new report. Credit UMHealthSystem / Flickr
ERs are a great place to treat real emergencies, but a very expensive place to do run-of-the-mill medical care. So the Health Care Authority, the agency that runs Medicaid, partnered with the Washington State Hospital Association, the Washington State Medical Association and others to adopt seven best practices aimed at ensuring ERs are used for their intended purpose.
They include things like keeping tabs on frequent ER users, referring people to primary care doctors and tightening up policies around prescribing narcotics.
The HCA’s chief medical officer Daniel Lessler says one crucial practice is sharing patient information among ERs, which can reduce costly duplications.
“A patient who is seen in an emergency room for a headache and got a head CT comes in with the same complaint to another emergency room three days later. Without that information, they probably are going to repeat the work-up,” Lessler said.
In fiscal year 2013, ER visits dropped by 10 percent. Visits by those frequent users dropped even more, as did the rate of visits resulting in a scheduled drug prescription.
The ER reforms probably aren’t the only reason for those changes and the cost savings. Lessler says other changes over the same period, like moving people to managed care, probably get some credit.
A large study in Oregon recently found that expanding Medicaid to more people increased ER use, rather than decreasing it as hoped. That finding is controversial, but Lessler notes that Washington’s ER reforms put it in a good position as the state adds hundreds of thousands to the Medicaid rolls as a result of the Affordable Care Act.
The HCA and its partners plan to detail the findings at a noon announcement Thursday.
Image source: twitter.com/BuffySteMarie ‘If you really want to see something historic in your life, go to Fort McMurray and just bear witness to what they’re doing,’ says legendary musician-activist Sainte-Marie.
For decades, Buffy Sainte-Marie has been an artistic trailblazer. The Sixties folk explosion saw the Canadian-born Cree songwriter confront the colonial status quo with hit songs like “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” as well as the anti-war anthem “Universal Soldier.” Sainte-Marie, who is currently based in Hawaii, is gearing up to record her first album of new material since 2008 (more on that later), and took a few minutes to share her thoughts on a number of topics with ICTMN.
We’ve seen your Tweets (@BuffySteMarie) about the oil sands, or tar sands as they’re sometimes called — what’s your take on the situation?
Almost a year ago I went to Fort McMurray (Alberta) and I was just devastated with what’s going on there. Just devastated. I just told everybody I could: “You’ve got to take this seriously.” Even since I was there, other people have really stepped forward in their own ways, Neil Young in particular. He’s caught a lot of criticism because he didn’t involve me, Susan Aglukark or other Native people. Neil came to the induction ceremony in Nashville, at the Musicians Hall of Fame, and I told him I’d seen some of the criticism and not to listen to it at all! Because it’s so important, it has to be everybody doing whatever they can, whenever they can, and being effective at whatever level they can be. You reach people your way, I do it my way and Neil does it his way. But people have to see it.
It’s really worth a trip to Fort McMurray just to see it with your own eyes. If you really want to see something historic in your life, go to Fort McMurray and just bear witness to what they’re doing. It’s never going to return, and this is the future of the planet if the present people are allowed to stay in charge. We are allowing them to stay in charge. We are allowing it. That’s why we have wars. We have to be really vigilant and supportive of one another, because it has to stop. There’s no turning back.
Neil Young toured with the First Nation that’s experiencing high cancer rates from the tar sands. And yet he also caught criticism when people said, “Oh, he’s just an outsider, he lives in California — what right does he have to criticize this?”
(Laughs). Because it’s not only about Canada, that’s why! Good for Neil for stepping up. Everybody should be stepping up at whatever their most effective level is. It’s not just about Native people and it’s not just about Canada. Just the weather changes are indicative: people just gotta wake up.
Have the issues changed over time, or is it still the same root issues as in your songs “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” or “Universal Soldier”?
The root issue is always the same. It’s about corporate greed in charge of all of our energy. That’s the root issue. But in the 1500s it was gold and silver in Central America, and then coal, oil, and now uranium. I have a song that’s going to be on the album I’m recording now called “The Uranium War.” It has a line:
Coal and oil and hey, now uranium
Keep the Indians under your thumb
Pray like hell when your bad times come
Get ’em up, rip ’em up, strip ’em up
Get ’em with a gun.
So the violence that occurs, and has been occurring against Indigenous People in the world because of resources has now become obvious to the non-indigenous people too. There are now more people understanding how devastating the misuse of resources not only can be, but just plain is.
Let’s talk about the Longest Walk. Richie Havens passed on last year, and you were a long supporter of the Longest Walk and affirming treaty rights. Could you offer some thoughts on him, his passing and his legacy?
He and I kind of emerged around the same time — the summer of 1963-4. We would see each other over the years. He came and visited me in Hawaii a few times. We were good friends. He was such an incredible interpreter of other people’s songs, and such a good guy. Pete Seeger too — he just did so much for the world through music, in ways both subtle and big. You know, heaven must be a great place, because there’s a lot of people going there!
Pete Seeger with Buffy Sainte-Marie. Source: twitter.com/buffystemarie
You were with Pete Seeger at Clearwater Fest last summer. The photos were just beautiful, you guys having a lovely hug.
He was just really, really special, huh?
Do you ever feel nostalgic for that era, when you all emerged almost at once? It must have been such a different energy because it was also a social movement as well as being about music.
It was, but I’ve been waiting for it to come back. And I think it has. For me, the Internet is like the Sixties. It used to be, in the Sixties, all kinds of music was available to you, but it was kept away. You had to go with this label and that genre. It really became a very narrow-minded corporate world. They’d sign 90 artists and shelve 90 others. It used to be so unfair. But now you can hear all kinds of music, and everybody can get played, publish a song, or share things on the Internet. It’s such a wonderful time that we’re living in. You shouldn’t discount it or think that the Sixties were better. The Sixties were about a true student movement. And now there’s another true populist movement, so let’s do what we can, while we can.
To learn more about Buffy Sainte-Marie, visit her official site BuffySainte-Marie.com.
K-Cups seem like the complicated Starbucks order of today: an expensive, caffeinated way to express your oh-so-unique taste and personality. Who needs to run out for a tall caramel macchiato when you can make a single serving of Wolfgang Puck’s Jamaica Me Crazy medium roast in the comfort of your kitchen?
Except all those little plastic cups add up to some massive trash. Ten and a half loops around the equator, in fact, according to Mother Jones. Kind of ridic for a company owned by a fair-trade, organic coffee brand, no?
Plus, the No. 7 plastic blend is BPA-free, but that doesn’t mean it’s safe. Even if all that plastic magically disappeared into the ether on disposal, its manufacture could be making workers sick, writes MoJo:
One concern with this plastic mix is the presence of polystyrene, containing the chemical styrene, which Hoover warns is especially worrisome for workers. A possible carcinogen, styrene can wreak havoc on the nervous systems of those handling it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…
Keurig would not tell me what types of plastic go into its #7 blend, saying the information was proprietary, nor would it confirm or deny the presence of polystyrene in the mix.
If that weren’t bad enough, Keurig taxes you for being bad at math: K-Cups cost you more than twice what a bag of beans does — about $50 a pound. Damn, son! If you refuse to surrender your Keurig, reusable filters or biodegradable pods are the way to go.
Tulalip tribal elder and Elders Panel member William Shelton, now deceased, explains how the diversion program works to the Indian Law & Order Commission in their visit to Tulalip Tribal Court in September 2011. Photo/ Brandi N. Montreuil, Tulalip News
By Brandi N. Montreuil, Tulalip News
TULALIP, WA – The 2012 Annual Tulalip Tribal Court Report states 415 criminal cases were heard in court. Included in that 415, are 24 newly filed criminal alcohol charges and 69 disposed, meaning judicial proceeding have ended or a case that has been resolved. Also counted in that 415, are 76 newly filed criminal drug cases and 126 disposed. Helping to tackle these numbers is a group of volunteer Tulalip elders, who are teaching offenders accountability in a traditional way, and saving the court thousands of dollars.
In it’s sixth year, Tulalip Tribal Court’s Elders Panel is a diversion program that uses traditional Tulalip culture and the wisdom and experiences of Tulalip elders to reach first-time offenders and eliminate re-offending.
The panel meets every two weeks with non-violent first-time offenders, ages 18-42, who have been charged with minor criminal offenses such as possession of alcohol or marijuana, or criminal mischief. Currently the panel consists of Donald Hatch Jr., Lee Topash , Dale Jones, Arthur Hank Williams Sr., Eleanor M. Nielson, and Katherine M. Monger.
Enrollment in the program is voluntary but comes with a large incentive to complete it. Defendants receive deferred prosecutions on their criminal charges for the length of their enrollment in the program, usually a year. Upon successful completion of the program, charges are dismissed. This is the one of the largest incentives a diversion program can offer a first-time offender; it is a chance to rebuild a life.
“If many of these offenders went through the regular process they would be in jail,” said Topash about the opportunity the program provides for participants. “We don’t cut them any slack. The one thing we encounter is attitude, especially with the young folks, they try and get things by us, but they quickly realize what it’s all about.”
The panel requires defendants to actively engage in their community and culture to learn the impact their actions create, not just in their life, but the lives of their family members and community members. Requirements include regular appearances before the panel, writing letters of apology, community service, substance abuse treatment, curfews, UA’s, anger management classes, mental health evaluations, and no new violations. Cultural participation can include family research and traditional spiritual activities.
“Coming here, has been the best thing for me,” said a current client. “If I hadn’t come here I would have lost my kids. I struggled at the beginning and I slacked off. I didn’t take it seriously and didn’t finish all my community service hours and I had to go to jail for a few days. Listening to the girls in jail it made me think about the opportunity I have in this program. I didn’t want to be in there. This program has changed me a lot and I am grateful, because this is the longest that I have been clean and sober in a long time.”
According to court estimates, the panel typically handles 10 cases a year, saving the court an average of $20,000 a year in judicial and probation time, including jail cost, which can run the Tribe $67.92 a day for each incarcerated tribal members, sentenced through Tulalip Tribal Court, and a $97 booking fee.
“There are costs that we cannot measure in terms of costs to society when young offenders are before Elders Panel and follow the sanctions sentenced by Elders Panel, and are not committing any new crimes,” said Tulalip Tribal Court Director, Wendy Church.
“We like to play the role of the grandfather and grandmother because we want to give advice that a grandfather or grandmother would give,” said Hatch about the cultural approach portion of the program.
Many of the positive changes in a defendant’s behavior early on in the process can be attributed to regular meetings. In small communities such as tribal communities, it is not unusual for participants to be familiar with elders on the panel. This eliminates the clinical judicial feel experienced in typical judicial diversion programs. This can be considered the program’s greatest keys to success.
“Indian people traditionally do not have good feelings about court systems,” explained Tulalip chairman, Mel Sheldon Jr. “This program shows the young people that we all make mistakes but here are ways to recover from them.”
Although some offenders will re-offend, Elders Panel sees an 87 percent success rate in participants.
“The loss of this program would be huge in this community,” said Hatch. “We have saved the Tribe close to a million dollars over the past six years. If we were not here a lot of our children would be in the court system and it would increase the cost to the court and to the Tribe. We would also lose all the good work through community service that helps our community, but more importantly we would lose helping our people.”
In 2009, the Tulalip Tribal Court’s Elders Panel was recognized by the Washington State Bar Association (WSBA) for the Local Hero’s Award. The WSBA Board of Governors searches statewide for noteworthy programs that have made substantial contributions to their communities, this recognition is bestowed upon non-lawyers.
For more information about the Elders Panel or to volunteer to be on the panel, please contact Tulalip Tribal Court at 360-716-4773.
Brandi N. Montreuil: 360-913-5402; bmontreuil@tulaliptribes-nsn.gov
Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell has announced that $3.2 million has been awarded to 21 tribal projects to assist in developing energy and mineral resources, including $655,000 to the Crow Tribe to advance a hydroelectric project that will provide low-cost clean power to tribal members and encourage business on Crow lands.
Secretary Jewell, who serves as Chair of the White House Council on Native American Affairs, announced the grants during a visit to the Crow Reservation in southeastern Montana. Jewell was joined by Senator Jon Tester, the new chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Larry Roberts.
Jewell is making a three-day visit to Montana, meeting with tribal and business leaders, ranchers, hunters and anglers and other stakeholder groups to discuss the economic value of public lands to local communities, the importance of the Land and Water Conservation Fund in expanding access to hunting and fishing areas, and public-private partnerships that protect public lands, such as the Blackfoot Challenge for the southern part of the Crown of the Continent ecosystem.
The $655,000 grant to the Crow Tribe will allow completion of all technical, environmental, engineering and economic analyses required for an 8 to 12 megawatt hydroelectric project at the Yellowtail Afterbay Dam on the Crow Reservation. This will allow the Tribe to seek power purchase agreements and financing to build the facility, which will provide electricity to its members and invite industry to the reservation with the certainty of reliable, sustainable and clean low-cost power. The project is also expected to improve the Big Horn River’s downstream fishery by reducing excessive nitrogen and oxygen levels.
In 2009, Senator Tester introduced and then successfully helped pass the Crow Tribe Water Settlement Act that authorized the Crow to develop hydropower at the dam.
As Chair of the White House Council on Native American Affairs, Secretary Jewell leads a comprehensive Federal initiative to work more collaboratively and effectively with Tribes to advance their economic and social priorities. Informed by consultation with the Tribes and reflective of tribal priorities, the Interior Department’s FY2015 budget requests $2.6 billion for Indian Affairs, $33.6 million above the 2014 enacted level, to sustain the President’s commitment and honor Interior’s trust responsibilities to the 566 federally recognized American Indian and Alaska Native Tribes.
Recognizing this commitment to tribal self-governance and self-determination, the budget fully funds contract support costs that Tribes incur as managers of the programs serving Native Americans.
A full list of the 21 projects receiving grant awards for energy and mineral development is available here and includes six for mineral extraction, two for oil and gas production and 13 for renewable energy, including wind, hydropower, geothermal and biomass proposals.
Funding for construction of the Crow hydropower project was authorized in the Crow Water Rights Settlement that President Obama signed on Dec. 8, 2010. In March 2011 Crow tribal members voted to ratify the Settlement legislation and the Crow Tribe-Montana Water Rights Compact. The Settlement legislation provided the Tribe with the authority to develop hydropower at Yellowtail Afterbay Dam along with some funding to assist in the development along with other energy development on the Reservation. The Grant announced today is an additional and needed boost to the Tribe as it works to develop hydropower.
Together, the Settlement Act and the Compact quantified the Tribe’s water rights and authorized funding of $131.8 million for the rehabilitation and improvement of the Crow Irrigation Project and $246.4 million for the design and construction of a Municipal, Rural and Industrial (MR&I) water system to serve numerous reservation communities.
The Crow Reservation is the largest of seven Indian reservations in Montana, encompassing 2.3 million acres and home to 13,000 enrolled Crow tribal members.
Using a new method for exploring ancient relationships among languages, linguists have found evidence further illuminating the peopling of North America about 14,000 years ago. Their findings follow a recent proposal that the ancestors of Native Americans were marooned for some 15,000 years on a now sunken plain before they reached North America.
This idea, known as the Beringian standstill hypothesis, has been developed by geneticists and archaeologists over the last seven years. It holds that the ancestors of Native Americans did not trek directly across the land bridge that joined Siberia to Alaska until the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. Rather, geneticists say, these ancestors must have lived in isolation for some 15,000 years to accumulate the amount of DNA mutations now seen specifically in Native Americans.
Archaeologists examining deep sea cores from the Bering Strait believe that a special ecological zone known as shrub tundra existed there during the Last Glacial Maximum, an exceptionally cold period that lasted from about 30,000 to 15,000 years ago. Though often referred to as a bridge, the now sunken region, known as Beringia, was in fact a broad plain. It was also relatively warm, and supported trees such as spruce and birch, as well as grazing animals.
Writing in the journal Science last month, John F. Hoffecker, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado, summarized the evidence for thinking the Beringian plain was the refuge for the ancestral Native American population identified by the geneticists. “The shrub tundra zone in central Beringia represents the most plausible home for the isolated standstill population,” he and colleagues wrote.
Dr. Hoffecker believes that the ancestral Native Americans could have kept warm with fires of animal bones and wood, and that their range was restricted by the availability of wood. “The paleoecological data is consistent with the idea of a refugium, and the wood might be a key variable,” he said in an interview.
Linguists have until now been unable to contribute to this synthesis of genetic and archaeological data. The first migrations to North America occurred between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, but most linguists have long believed that language trees cannot be reconstructed back further than 8,500 years. Vocabulary changes so fast that the signal of relationship between two languages is soon swamped by the noise of borrowed words and fortuitous resemblances.
But in 2008, Edward Vajda, a linguist at Western Washington University, said he had documented a relationship between Yeniseian, a group of mostly extinct languages spoken along the Yenisei River in central Siberia, and Na-Dene.
The Na-Dene languages are spoken in Alaska and western Canada, with two outliers in the American Southwest, Navajo and Apache. His assertion that the two families of languages had descended from a common tongue implied that he was seeing back in time at least 12,000 years or so, to the arrival of Na-Dene speakers in North America.
Many linguists accepted Dr. Vajda’s analysis, despite its time depth. He relied heavily on structural features of language, which turn out to be more resistant to change than vocabulary. In particular, he looked at Yeniseian and Na-Dene verbs, since languages in both groups have a template of fixed positions before and after the verb for specifying various attributes.
Building on Dr. Vajda’s success, two linguists, Mark A. Sicoli of Georgetown University and Gary Holton of the University of Alaska, have assessed the relationship of the two language families based on shared grammatical features, rather than vocabulary.
In a paper published in the journal PLoS One on Wednesday, they report their surprising finding that Na-Dene is not a descendant of Yeniseian, as would be expected if the Yeniseian speakers in Siberia were the source population of the Na-Dene migration. Rather, they say, both language families are descendants of some lost mother tongue. Their explanation is that this lost language was spoken in Beringia, and that its speakers migrated both east and west. The eastward group reached North America and became the Na-Dene speakers, while the westward group returned to Siberia and settled along the Yenisei River.
The Na-Dene migration from Beringia came after the main migration of 15,000 years ago, but the relationship between the two populations remains to be settled. “There may have been multiple streams of people moving out of that single source at different times,” said Dennis H. O’Rourke, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Utah.
If Yeniseian represents a return migration from Beringia, the question of the source population in Siberia of Native Americans is thrust back into obscurity. “If Yeniseian is off the table as a back-migration, there is no other candidate,” Dr. Sicoli said.
Several Yeniseian languages are known only from czarist fur tax records. Pumpokol, Arin, Assan and Kott have not been spoken for two centuries. The only surviving language, Ket, has fewer than 200 living speakers.
Offers Aim to Consolidate Fractionated Lands for Tribal Development; Will Be Valid for 45 Days as Part of $1.9 Billion Land Buy-Back Program
Office of Public Affairs – Indian Affairs
Office of the Assistant Secretary – Indian Affairs
U.S. Department of the Interior
WASHINGTON, DC – In another step to fulfill President Obama’s commitment to strengthen Indian communities, the U.S. Department of the Interior today announced that the Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations (Buy-Back Program) has sent purchase offers to nearly 16,000 individual landowners with fractionated interests in parcels on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Totaling more than $100 million, these offers will provide landowners the opportunity to voluntarily sell their fractionated interests, which would be consolidated and held in trust for the Oglala Sioux Tribe of the Pine Ridge Reservation.
“The success of the Buy-Back Program is vitally important to the future of Indian Country,” said Kevin K. Washburn, Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs. “Consolidating and returning these lands to tribes in trust will have enormous potential to unlock tribal community resources. While we know that it will be a challenge to reach all landowners, we are committed to exhausting all efforts to make sure that individuals are aware of this historic opportunity to strengthen tribal sovereignty by supporting the consolidation of tribal lands.”
The goal of the Buy-Back Program is to strengthen self-determination and self-governance for federally-recognized tribes. The Program implements the land consolidation component of the Cobell Settlement, which provided $1.9 billion to purchase fractionated interests in trust or restricted land from willing sellers at fair market value. Individuals who choose to sell their interests will receive payments directly in their IIM accounts. Consolidated interests are immediately restored to tribal trust ownership for uses benefiting the reservation community and tribal members.
Land fractionation is a serious problem across Indian Country. As individually-owned lands are passed down through several generations, they gain more and more owners. Many of these tracts now have hundreds and even thousands of individual owners. For many of these owners with fractionated interests, the land has very little practical value. Because it is difficult to gain landowner consensus on the use of these lands, the parcels often lie idle and cannot be used for any beneficial purpose.
The Pine Ridge Reservation is one of the most highly-fractionated land ownership locations in Indian Country. The vast majority of landowners with purchasable interests have received offers– and have been located in 46 states across the country.
Interior has worked cooperatively with the Oglala Sioux Tribe over the past several months to conduct outreach to educate landowners about this unique opportunity, answer questions and help individuals make a timely decision about their land. Many owners have already been paid in response to offers delivered in December 2013.
Early purchases from willing sellers at Pine Ridge have resulted in the consolidation of thousands of acres of land for the tribe and in payments to landowners exceeding $10 million. While the amounts offered to individuals have varied, some owners have received more than $100,000 for their interests. On average, payments to individuals have been made within seven days after Interior received a complete, accepted offer package.
Purchase offers are valid for 45 calendar days. Owners must accept and return current purchase offers for fractionated lands on Pine Ridge by May 2, 2014.
For information about outreach events at Pine Ridge where landowners can gather information in order to make informed decisions about their land, contact the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s Buy-Back Program at 605-867-2610.
Landowners can contact their local Fiduciary Trust Officer or call the Trust Beneficiary Call Center at 888-678-6836 with questions about their purchase offers. More information is also available at:http://www.doi.gov/buybackprogram/landowners.
Sellers receive fair market value for their land, in addition to a base payment of $75 per offer, regardless of the value of the land. All sales will also trigger contributions to the Cobell Education Scholarship Fund. Up to $60 million will go to this fund to provide scholarships to Native American students. These funds are in addition to purchase amounts paid to individual sellers, so contributions will not reduce the amount paid to landowners for their interests. The Scholarship Fund will be governed by a board of trustees and administered by the American Indian College Fund in Denver, Colo., with 20% going to the American Indian Graduate Center in Albuquerque, N.M.
Interior holds about 56 million acres in trust or restricted status for American Indians. The Department holds this land in more than 200,000 tracts, of which about 93,500 – on nearly 150 reservations – contain fractional ownership interests available for purchase by the Buy-Back Program. There are more than 245,000 landowners, holding more than 3 million fractionated interests in parcels, eligible to participate in the Program.
Individual participation is voluntary. A decision to sell land for restoration to tribes does not jeopardize a landowner’s ability to receive individual settlement payments from the Cobell Settlement, which are being handled by the Garden City Group.
Tulalip, Washington — Tulalip Resort Casino invites fans to rock to the pulsating sounds of Queen and Boston, on Sunday, May 25. Starting at 8:00pm in the Orca Ballroom, the Resort will host “Rock the Empire,” a tribute style concert with classic music from two of the greatest bands of the 70’s and 80’s. Groupies can sway to the lively beats while sipping on cocktails from the no-host bar.
Queen Nation – Queen Tribute Band
Queen Nation was formed in 2004, and consists of band members: Joe Retta or Gregory Finsley on vocals and keyboards as Freddie Mercury; Mike McManus on guitar as Brian May; Pete Burke on drums as Roger Taylor; and Parker Combs on bass as John Deacon. The group’s mission is to carry on the musical torch and pay homage to the golden age of vintage Queen concerts. Music lovers can jam to ultimate Queen songs such as “Cold Stone Crazy,” “Tie Your Mother Down,” “Somebody to Love,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” and more.
Third Stage – Boston Tribute Band
Borrowed Time hails from Seattle and will make their debut as “Third Stage” at Tulalip. They play the greatest hits from the band Boston, filling the show with great renditions and the enthusiasm that is reflective of the band’s personalities. Not a look alike act, but a rocking and melodic band that faithfully recreates the magic of Boston, concert goers will enjoy classics like “A Man I’ll Never Be,” “Something About You,” “Smokin,” and many more. Band members and the characters they play are Arny Bailey as Brad Delp on vocals; Aaron Cheney as guitar wizard Tom Scholz; Bryan Woolley as Fran Sheehan on bass; David Shore on keyboards; Dave Farrell as guitarist Barry Goudreau; and Marc Montagnino as Sib Hashian on drums.
This event is limited to those 21 and over. Tickets go on sale March 28th at the Resort’s Rewards Club desk or Ticketmaster. They are priced at $15 per person in advance or $25 per person at the door.
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About Tulalip Resort Casino
Award winning Tulalip Resort Casino is the most distinctive gaming, dining, meeting, entertainment and shopping destination in Washington State. The AAA Four Diamond resort’s world class amenities have ensured its place on the Condé Nast Traveler Gold and Traveler Top 100 Resorts lists, as well as Preferred Hotel and Resorts membership. The property includes 192,000 square feet of gaming excitement; a luxury hotel featuring 370 guest rooms and suites; 30,000 square feet of premier meeting, convention and wedding space; the full-service T Spa; and 7 dining venues, including the AAA Four Diamond Tulalip Bay Restaurant. It also showcases the intimate Canoes Cabaret and a 3,000-seat amphitheater. Nearby, find the Hibulb Cultural Center and Natural History Preserve, Cabela’s; and Seattle Premium Outlets, featuring more than 110 name brand retail discount shops. The Resort Casino is conveniently located between Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. just off Interstate-5 at Exit 200. It is an enterprise of the Tulalip Tribes. For reservations please call (866) 716-7162.
A German museum dedicated to much-loved Wild West adventure author Karl May has gotten caught in a row with Native Americans over human remains in its display. The tribes have called for their return – to no avail.
Germany’s fascination with the Wild West is largely down to one man – Karl May, the celebrated adventure author whose stories of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand fed the dreams of countless German children from the late 19th century on. The highpoint of his fame arrived in the 1960s with the still fondly-remembered movie adaptations.
Now the Karl May Museum in Radebeul outside Dresden has been caught in a row with two Native American tribes over a set of scalps in its display cases. Cecil Pavlat, cultural repatriation specialist of the Ojibwe Nation – to which one of the scalps is said to belong – wrote a letter to the museum earlier this month about the offense caused by the “insensitive display” of these “ancestral remains” – and asking for their return.
The Winnetou movies are much-loved classics in Germany
“It’s a part of that human being,” Pavlat told DW. “It’d be no different to cutting a hand off, or an arm and displaying that – it’s just not culturally appropriate or even acceptable by most ethnic groups, whether they’re Native American or not.”
Pavlat also sees the display itself as part of an age-old misrepresentation of Native Americans. “That’s the way we view it, as ancestral remains, even speaking the word ‘scalps’ – it creeps me out,” he said. “Some say that this was a practice created by our people. History tells us that this has been practiced throughout history in other places, including Europe.”
Tough negotiations
The museum got most of its collection of scalps from Karl May fanatic Ernst Tobis, an eccentric traveller and sometime acrobat who went by the pseudonym Patty Frank. The Austrian bequeathed his huge collection of Native American artifacts to the museum in 1926.
So far the museum has been cagey about responding to the requests, which go back further than Pavlat’s letter. Mark Worth, an American living in Berlin, was outraged when he first saw the scalps on display and brought the display to the attention of Karen Little Coyote of the Arapaho-Cheyenne Tribes in Oklahoma. She wrote a letter to the museum last fall. After correspondence with the US embassy, a cultural attaché from the Leipzig consulate went to the museum and, according to an e-mail she sent to Little Coyote later, handed over a copy of the letter in person.
Ojibwe repatriation specialist Pavlat accused the museum of an ‘insensitive display’
Yet the US embassy, for its part, has largely left the matter to the tribes to deal with, recommending that the tribes contact the museum directly, and adding, in an e-mailed statement to DW, “The Consulate in Leipzig shared the information in the letter with the Karl May Museum earlier this year during the course of a meeting that touched upon a variety of other matters.”
Museum director Claudia Kaulfuss at first refused to acknowledge that any “official request” had arrived, but told DW: “In principle we are ready to talk, but first we want to understand what is wanted. We have four scalps on display, and it’s not even clear which tribes they belong to. We have two from white people, two from Indians – one of them is more or less just a plait of hair, and whether any really belongs to an Ojibwe Indian we don’t know.”
But the history of the Karl May Museum, published on the Karl May Foundation website describes in dramatic detail how Tobis bought the first of his scalps in 1904 – “the most sought-after collector’s item.” On a night-time trip to an Indian reservation, Tobis held “tough negotiations” with Dakota chief Swift Hawk, “who had won the scalp in a fight with an Ojibwe,” and bought the “trophy” for two bottles of whisky, a bottle of apricot brandy, and $1,100.
A piece of history
“We’re just showing a piece of history,” Kaulfuss told DW. “It’s an ethnological exhibition. We don’t want to falsify the history of the Indians in America.”
The museum contains a number of Native American cultural items
“Of course we’d enter into dialogue,” she added. “But we’d also want to put forward our side. We’re a museum in Germany, subject to German law, and we’d like to explain why we want to show a piece of history, and that we aren’t pillorying anything with it. But they can’t just expect us to hand something over without talking to anyone about it first, because then more people might come and soon our museum would be empty.”
Tugs-of-war between museums and indigenous cultures have become an issue in recent decades all over the world. The US passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, which forced federal institutions to return all “cultural items” to the relevant tribes. There was, moreover, a significant precedent only this month, when the University of Freiburg returned some 14 skulls to Namibia.
Worth thinks that human remains should hold a special position in such negotiations. “We should start with pieces of human beings. If we can’t agree that parts of human beings should go back to their families and communities, where are we?” he told DW. “That should be a minimum standard of dignity in this world.”
For some, it’s more disconcerting that the Karl May Museum is based around the work of an author who wrote the bulk of his fiction before he ever visited the US. As Worth put it: “It is fitting that the Karl May Museum – whose limited knowledge and false impressions of Native Americans have their foundation in fictional characters invented by someone who had spent limited time with Native Americans – is now claiming to know the best resting place for remains of Native Americans.”
