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By Niki Cleary, Tulalip News
Ever wonder where that basket your grandmother gave you came from? How about the artifact, or regalia. Follow the link. Recorded at the Hibulb Cultural Center and Natural History Preserve, the Hibulb Antique Appraisals program features local Hibulb museum guests and their Native American antiques and collectibles as an accredited antique appraiser provides information and current market value of their items.
By Ashley Ahearn, KUOW
SEATTLE — The Navy is pursuing permits to continue conducting sonar and explosives exercises in a large area of the Pacific Ocean — and that’s putting marine mammal advocates on high alert.
Public hearings kick off next week as the Navy gathers public comments on its draft environmental impact statement for the Northwest training and testing range. The range stretches from northern California to the Canadian border.
Marine mammals, like porpoises, gray and fin whales and endangered orcas, travel through the Navy’s training range. That’s why marine mammal advocates are voicing concerns about the Navy’s activities.
In the draft EIS the Navy outlined plans to conduct up to 100 mid-range active sonar tests each year. That type of sonar has been shown to affect marine mammal behavior.
The Navy also wants to conduct up to 30 bombing exercises per year in the range.
John Mosher, Northwest Environmental program manager for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, says the training range is critical to naval preparedness.
“At some point realistic training, whether it’s with explosives or sonar, has to take place and they truly are skills that are perishable, things that have to be routinely conducted to be able to do them in case the real need occurs,” Mosher said.
The Navy gathered more than 300 public comments during an earlier scoping phase of its environmental review. Most of those comments centered around impacts on marine mammals.
The Navy has plans in place to look and listen for marine mammals before and during testing exercises. But environmentalists say the mitigation measures are inadequate.
“They’re dropping bombs and you can’t see orcas from the air,” said Howard Garrett of Orca Network. “There’s every real danger that orcas are going to stray into a live bombing range and we don’t want to see that.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been studying the endangered orca population of Puget Sound by tagging orcas and using underwater acoustic monitoring devices to better understand how the whales move through the region. The population of Southern Resident Orcas is hovering around 80 individuals, and has been decreasing in recent years.
Brad Hanson, an expert on orcas with NOAA, says the area within the naval training and testing range is an important forage area for the whales.
“We want to figure out if there are particular areas that the whales are using so the Navy could avoid using those areas for training exercises that might cause any type of harassment of the animals,” he said.
Hanson’s tagging research has shown orcas moving from Washington to northern California within the span of a week.
Last year a 3-year-old female orca washed up dead near the mouth of the Columbia River. Her body showed signs of trauma that could have been the result of an explosion but it had been drifting on the Columbia River’s eddies for days, making the results of the necropsy report inconclusive. The official findings were to be released by NOAA Fisheries on Monday.
“It’s probably the most comprehensive necropsy report I’ve ever seen done on a killer whale,” Hanson said.
The Navy also recently announced plans to build a new $15 million dollar facility near Port Angeles, Wash. on the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Public meetings will be held from 5-8 p.m. for the following dates and locations:
The deadline for written comments on the Northwest Training and Testing range EIS is March 25.
By Niki Cleary, Tulalip News
Although we’re hearing predictions of snow this weekend, if you look, there are signs of spring everywhere. Many people see cherry blossoms as one of the first signs, however, here at Tulalip we look for Indian Plum and other native plants. The above photo was taken in my back yard. Along with the lengthening day, these small bits of green tell us that spring is here.
Police are still processing what they called a horrific crime scene at Cedarville Rancheria tribal headquarters near Altura, California, after 44-year-old Sherie Rhoades gunned down her brother, niece and nephew at an eviction hearing.
Four people in all were killed, including the tribal leader, Rhoades’s brother, the Associated Press Reported. Two were critically wounded.
Altura police identified the deceased as Angel Moonstar Penn, 19; Glenn Phillip Calonico, 30; Shelia Lynn Russo, 47, and Rurik Daniel Davis, 50. Russo was not related to Rhoades, AP said.
The two wounded survivors were sisters, the Los Angeles Times reported, and they were flown to hospitals in Redding, about 130 miles away. Altura police said in an e-mailed statement that “as of this morning, one victim was still listed in critical condition and the second was alert and talking.”
Rhoades was taken into custody.
“There are no public safety concerns and we have no information indicating there was any other suspects involved at this time,” the police statement said. “Rhoades was being held at the Modoc County Jail on charges of homicide, attempted murder, child endangerment and brandishing a weapon. She has been moved to an undisclosed facility, for her safety.”
Nearby Alturas Indian Rancheria closed their tribal headquarters on Friday out of respect after the Thursday February 20 shooting.
The carnage began at about 3:30 p.m., according to police and witness accounts, when former tribal chairwoman Sherie Lash, also known as Sherie Rhoades, pulled out a 9-millimeter shotgun during a hearing about the potential eviction of her and her son from tribal lands.
A judge who had been remotely attending the hearing via phone could only listen, KTXL-TV reported.
A witness escaped from the offices and ran down the street, covered in blood, to summon police, KRCR-TV reported. When officers arrived they found the 44-year-old Rhoades outside the building, clutching the butcher knife she had grabbed from the kitchen when she ran out of ammunition.
Police said the investigation is ongoing and that the investigators from the California Department of Justice and the California Highway Patrol Multi-Disciplinary Accident Investigation Team are helping local police process the crime scene. The victims were scheduled to be autopsied on Friday, according to News-10.
“We’re trying to get this thing resolved as quick as possible,” Alturas Police Chief Ken Barnes told News10-TV. “So it’s, it’s a huge impact on our community.”
Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/02/21/cedarville-rancheria-shooter-killed-brother-niece-nephew-police-153686
By Hansi Lo Wang, from NPR All Things Considered show
This Thursday, three Native American tribes are changing how they administer justice.
For almost four decades, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling has barred tribes from prosecuting non-American Indian defendants. But as part of last year’s re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, a new program now allows tribes to try some non-Indian defendants in domestic abuse cases.
It will be another year before the program expands to other eligible federally-recognized tribes around the country in March 2015. But the Department of Justice has selected three tribes to exercise this authority first, including the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon, and the Tulalip Tribes, located north of Seattle.
‘Going To War’
Deborah Parker serves as the Tulalip Tribes’ vice chair. For three years, she flew back and forth between Washington state and Washington, D.C., giving speeches and knocking on doors — an experience that she says felt like “going to war.”
“You got to go to battle,” Parker says, “and you have to convince a lot of people that native women are worth protecting,”
And that protection, Parker was convinced, had to come from Congress. So she pushed for legislation allowing American Indian tribes to prosecute non-Indian defendants in domestic violence cases.
About four out of every ten women of American Indian or Alaskan Native descent have “experienced rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s an alarming statistic that Parker knows all too well from growing up on the reservation.
“We didn’t have a strong police presence when I was younger. Even [if you called] the police, often they didn’t respond,” she says. “When they did, they would say, ‘Oh, it’s not our jurisdiction, sorry.’ [And] prosecutors wouldn’t show up.”
A Question Of Jurisdiction
Jurisdiction is the key word in this discussion.
In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe that tribal governments have no jurisdiction over crimes committed by non-Native Americans on tribal land.
Instead, tribes have to rely on federal prosecutors to take on such cases, and prosecutors have not always been able or willing to consistently pursue reports of domestic violence.
Deborah Parker and other advocates pushed to address this issue — and some lawmakers in Congress pushed back.
One of the most vocal opponents of the new program was Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa. He voiced his concerns about the constitutionality of the program during a Senate debate last February, weeks before the Violence Against Women Act was reauthorized.
“The key stumbling block to enacting a bill at this time is the provision concerning Indian tribal courts,” Grassley said, referring to a provision that allows American Indian tribal courts to have jurisdiction over non-Indians accused of domestic violence.
Stepping Towards A Solution
But Fred Urbina, chief prosecutor for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, says the provision that passed is fairly complicated and narrow. “This basically helped it pass through Congress and get approval, so everybody’s describing this as a first step,” he says.
The “special domestic violence criminal jurisdiction” program is limited to certain domestic violence cases involving non-Native American defendants who are in existing relationships with Native Americans and living or working on the reservation. In Alaska, it only applies to the Metlakatla Indian Community of Annette Islands Reserve.
Still, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe’s Attorney General Amanda Sampson Lomayesva says the program will offer a new route for justice.
“It is a ray of hope,” she says “Maybe we can start protecting people and having the tribal members who live here on the reservation feel like something will be done.”
Brent Leonhard, an attorney for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, also sees the program as a partial solution to “a mess created both by a Supreme Court decision and by federal law and policy.”
“This is a step towards trying to improve that,” he says.
Parker acknowledges that the program “doesn’t answer all the questions” about how tribal governments can play a more direct role in addressing crime by non-Native Americans.
“But it allows us to exert jurisdiction and arrest those who violate protection orders [and commit] dating violence [or] domestic violence,” says Parker, who adds that she hopes the program will give a stronger voice to more Native American women
Four people are dead, two are critically injured and a woman is in custody after a shooting at the Cedarville Rancheria Tribal Office and Community Center in Alturas, California.
Police say the 44-year-old woman, known as Sherie Lash, or as Sherie Rhoades, opened fire during an eviction hearing at about 3:30 p.m. Pacific time on February 20, Reuters reported. Two women, aged 19 and 45, and two men, 30 and 50, died, and two others were airlifted to hospitals in critical condition. Police told ABC affiliate KRCR-TV that one of the deceased was the current tribal leader.
Rhoades, a former chairwoman of the 35-member federally recognized tribe, was attending a hearing about her potential eviction from tribal lands, the Redding, California, Record Searchlight reported. After shooting the five people, Rhoades allegedly went after a sixth with a butcher knife, police said.
Cedarville is about 15 miles east of Alturas, in northeastern California near the Oregon border.
Check back for updates from ICTMN.
Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/02/21/shooting-cedarville-rancheria-tribal-office-leaves-4-dead-2-critically-injured-153670
Source: Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission
The Stillaguamish and Tulalip tribes have partnered with the state Department of Natural Resources and three private timber companies to map forestlands in the Stillaguamish and Skykomish basins.
LIDAR, which stands for Light Distance and Ranging, uses an airborne laser to survey topography.
“The laser pulses from the plane are reflected back to record billions of points of light that measure elevation,” said Derek Marks, Timber/Fish/Wildlife biologist for Tulalip.
Elevation data was collected on working forestlands and a large area of Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. The result is a high-resolution model that enables natural resources managers to identify resources and potential risks, such as landslides.
“We can save many hours with high-resolution models,” Marks said. “We don’t have to walk the hillside; a forester would have to traverse the area to know where the streams are.”
The new LIDAR surveys covered an area that previously had not been mapped, where the forest canopy covers streams. The models will guide environmental permit reviews for logging and road proposals.
“We’re also reflying the entire North Fork Stillaguamish corridor to compare the data with LIDAR from 2003, to see what’s changed in a 10-year period,” said Scott Rockwell, Timber/Fish/Wildlife biologist for Stillaguamish. Those surveys will cover tribal restoration projects on the North Fork.
“It streamlines management and risk assessment for private industry and state lands,” Rockwell said. “It allows tribes to prioritize and scope restoration projects where we can see obvious habitat potential.”
The surveys were coordinated by the Puget Sound LIDAR Consortium, an informal group of federal and local agencies that acts as a clearinghouse for the high-resolution topographic models, making the data available to the public.
By Andrew Gobin, Tulalip News
The Tulalip Heritage Hawks continue to blaze through the district championships undefeated. Tonight’s intense game was an exhilarating win as the Hawks triumphed over the Shorewood Christian Lions 86-55, advancing on to the Tri-District Championship game next week.
By the end of the first quarter, the Hawks were already leading the Lions strong at 30-10, dominating the rest of the game staying ahead of the Lions by double the points. In the fourth quarter, the Lions started their assault on the Hawks, but could not get past their defense.
Dontae Jones – 4, Brandon Jones – 8, Bradley Fryberg – 9, Ayrik Miranda – 2, Trevor Fryberg – 3, Robert Miles Jr. – 19, Shawn Sanchey – 19, Keanu Hamilton – 20, Anthony McLean – 2.
Tulalip: 30, 22, 15, 19 Final 86
Shorewood: 10, 14, 14, 17 Final 55
The Tulalip Heritage Hawks will play Shorewood Christian Lions today at 3:00 p.m. at Mount Vernon Christian High School. This is the second tri-district game for district one 1B champions, the Heritage Hawks, who stand 23-1 for the season, undefeated in the post season, and are second seed for the 1B class ranking.
Catch live updates on Tulalip News Facebook page.
Dream Big for Kids
