Contempt of court charges against Dusten Brown, Veronica’s birth father, have been dropped, according to an Oklahoma newspaper.
Veronica, now 4 years old, was caught in the middle of an internationally publicized custody dispute involving her Native American heritage.
Brown, who lives in Oklahoma, faced contempt charges for refusing to comply with a Charleston County Family Court order to return Veronica to her adoptive parents, Matt and Melanie Capobianco of James Island.
The court dropped that charge Thursday, according to the Tulsa World.
Brown still faces a criminal complaint of custodial interference in South Carolina.
Gov. Nikki Haley dropped efforts to extradite him, but the warrant is still active.
Brown also remains part of an Oklahoma civil case in which the Capobiancos’ attorneys are seeking to recoup more than $1 million in fees and legal expenses incurred during the custody battle.
Veronica’s birth mother gave her up for adoption to the Capobiancos shortly after she was born in September 2009.
Brown, who is part Cherokee, said his daughter was given up without his knowledge when he was getting ready to deploy to Iraq. Veronica’s mother argued he wasn’t involved in her life.
With the help of attorneys from the Cherokee Nation, Brown sued for custody under the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was designed to keep Native American families intact. Brown gained custody in December 2011, when Veronica was 27 months old.
The Capobiancos appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and were reunited with Veronica last September, when she was 4.
In this June 13, 2011 file photo, the Energy Tide 2, the largest tidal energy turbine ever deployed in the U.S., appears on a barge in Portland, Maine. Scientists at the University of Washington have determined that Admiralty Inlet, in Puget Sound, is an excellent place to test tidal turbines. (AP Photo/File)
A public electric utility in Everett could be among the first in the nation to generate power from the tides.
Scientists at the University of Washington have determined that Admiralty Inlet, in Puget Sound, is an excellent place to test tidal turbines.
“Admiralty Inlet stacks up pretty well, worldwide, in terms of its actual tidal energy resource,” said Craig Collar, assistant general manager at Snohomish County Public Utility District No. 1. Currents have been clocked at 6-7 knots, he said.
The PUD is pledged to maintain carbon-free power sources. It has wind power and is exploring geo-thermal energy, as well.
“We’re highly dependent on the Bonneville Power Administration,” said Collar. “That’s a lot of eggs in one basket and it only makes sense to diversify.”
The advantage of tidal power: tides are reliable and predictable.
The disadvantage is you have to pick the right spot.
The utility wants to place two turbines, each about 20-feet in diameter, on the bottom of Admiralty Inlet, 200 feet below the surface. The more than $20 million pilot project, funded in half by the U.S. Energy Department, is at least six years in development. It’s been delayed, in part, by a challenge from a California company that owns two trans-ocean fiber optic telecommunications cables.
“The turbines, as currently proposed, are dangerously close to our cable,” said Kurt Johnson, chief financial officer of Pacific Crossing. He’s worried that turbine deployment and maintenance could damage the cables.
“Pacific Crossing is not against tidal energy, or even this specific project. All we’re really asking is that the PUD locate the turbines a safe distance from our cable.”
“In fact, we have done that,” said Collar. “This project is now several hundred feet away from their cable, so the crux of the matter is our project simply doesn’t represent any risk whatsoever to their cable.”
Collar said an environmental review by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), draws the same conclusion.
“The facts are they’ve got a six-inch wide lease, we’re several hundred feet away, we have a deployment accuracy of less than ten feet, we won’t use any anchors at all in the deployment operation or maintenance of these devices,” said Collar.
Tribal and environmental groups have also challenged the project out of concern for fish and orcas.
“But the truth is these turbines rotate quite slowly, more the speed that we’d visualize for a turnstile, taking several seconds just to make a single revolution,” Collar explained.
The utility is awaiting approval of a license from FERC and some state and local permits. The soonest the turbines could be deployed would be 2015.
It’s not known if tidal power will prove effective around here.
The Snohomish County PUD No.1 will hook up the turbines to the power grid but Collar said this pilot project is more about collecting data than generating electricity. If approved, the turbines will operate for three-to-five years and be removed.
SNOQUALMIE — One day after being accused of running Snoqualmie Casino illegally by replacing its gaming commission with the Tribal Council, Tribal Chairwoman Carolyn Lubenau said a new commission has been selected and is being directed, in the interim, by the tribe’s police chief.
Lubenau said the selection of three new Snoqualmie Gaming Commissioners was made Thursday, and had no connection to a lawsuit filed last Friday or a report on accusations included in the litigation by KING 5 the day before.
The lawsuit, filed by former SGC Chairman William Papazian, outlines a deteoriating relationship between the commission and the Snoqualmie Casino staff it is required by law to oversee.
According to federal law, tribal gaming agencies/commissions must be independent from the casinos and tribes they watch.
Lubenau said Thursday the problems between the SGC and the casino had nothing to do with Papazian, but the Executive Director and Manager he hired.
“We want professionals,” she explained, “You have to be above reproach. You can’t have tantrums.”
Lubenau said commission staff frequently threatened to pull gaming licenses from casino personnel “for no reason”. The tribe, she said, conducted two independent investigations.
“It was very clear, if we wanted to have our gaming commission functioning in the way we want to go, we need to terminate those two positions,” said Lubenau.
Papazian refused to go along, according to Lubenau and court documents, and resigned.
“It was very amicable,” recalled Lubenau, “He said in the resignation it was a family matter.”
Beyond what led to his departure is what Papazian alleged has happened in the interim, the SGC being filled with the Tribal Council.
Just one day after the situation became public, Lubenau said changes have been made. Thursday, three commissioners were appointed under an interim Executive Director, police chief Gene Fenton.
None of the commissioners have gaming experience, which is not required by law. Fenton is handling background checks for all casino employees, a task usually handled by the SGC.
“We won’t be caught by surprise when things are not working right,” said Lubenau, “We can fix things before they get to this point where they unravel so quickly like they did.”
As for why Papazian would file a lawsuit against his former employer, accusing it of “fraud”, “racketeering”, and “money laundering”, Lubenau thinks the answer is simple. Money.
When people talk about American Indian women novelists, the names that come to mind are typically Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich and Joy Harjo. But there are many worthy yet lesser-known American Indian female fiction writers whose names do not trip off the tongue. Here are some of them:
Debra Magpie Earling
Debra Magpie Earling
Earling, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation, published her award-winning Perma Red in 2002. The novel recounts the hardships suffered by Louise White Elk, a tale based on the true-life story of Earling’s aunt. Twenty years in the writing, Perma Red tells “a story that has burdened my family for years,” says Earling.
In describing the difficulty of getting the book written, which included a fire that destroyed her first 800-page draft, and getting it published, which included a decision to revise the ending because publishers would not accept a novel in which the protagonist dies—the real Aunt Louise died at 23 of exposure after a car accident—Earling says, “If you have a story that you need to tell and you want it out in the world, there’s some tenacious spirit that we [writers] all have.”
Earling has taught creative writing at the University of Montana, where she is a full professor, for the past 22 years.
Perma Red won the Western Writers Association Spur Award, the Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for Best First Novel, a WILLA Literary Award and the American Book Award.
Earling is working on a proposal for a second novel and hopes eventually to write a novel based on the life of Sacajawea. “She was a traditional woman… some accounts suggest she was as young as 14 years old when she was traveling [with Lewis and Clark]. She saw the true coming of the white man and the movement westward in a way that no one else had the opportunity to see. My biggest dream is to write that novel,” says Earling.
Linda LeGarde Grover (University of Minnesota, Duluth)
Linda LeGarde Grover
Author of two award-winning book-length collections of interconnected short stories, Grover, Bois Forte Band of Objiwe, is a professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.
Grover’s novels are based on her long-standing academic research interest—looking at how federal and state Indian policies affect Ojibwe families. As an undergraduate, “I began my research on boarding schools in northern Minnesota and that became the foundation for everything I’ve done.”
When she was doing the research for her master’s the chairman of her committee suggested she give fiction a try. “I started out by writing a story, and then another one that was connected to it. I ended up with a box of stories and put together eight of them when the University of Georgia Press sent out a call for manuscripts. That became The Dance Boots,” which was published in 2010 and won the 2009 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the 2011 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize.
Grover’s second novel-length collection of stories, The Road Back to Sweetgrass, is expected to be published in 2014. In 2008, the manuscript won the Native Writers Circle of the Americas First Book Award. The novel is arranged in four sections, each of which has linked stories that do not follow a linear timeline. The format for both books, says Grover, “seems to me a natural way of Native storytelling that has existed for a really long time. I never thought, ‘I’m going to write a book.’ I said to myself, ‘I think I will write a story.’” The old traditional stories, says Grover, are linked stories that are all part of a big picture. Grover’s research on boarding school families, beginning with the Dawes Act and continuing to the present, is integrated into Sweetgrass, which depicts people who, like herself, grew up during the era of federal termination policy.
Linda Hogan speaking in Binger, Oklahoma in 2008. (Wikipedia)
Linda Hogan
Hogan, Chickasaw, won a National Endowment for the Arts fiction grant in 1986, a Guggenheim for fiction in 1990, and a Lannan Award in 1994. She has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, The Wordcraft Circle, and The Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association.
Hogan’s first novel, Mean Spirit (1991) received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Mountains and Plains Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize the year that honor went to John Updike. Solar Storms (1997) and Power (1999) were both finalists for the International Impact Award.
Hogan’s writing reflects her commitment to cultural conservation and traditional ecosystem knowledge, among other interests. “The spiritual tradition is part of all of my work, my daily life, because it acknowledges the life of the earth and all that lives on it. I do not place any life above other life. I watch how the forest is important to water, both to aquifers and to calling down rain, even to communication with other trees, and the ground it exists in and the Earth is filled with so much life inside it, a terrestrial intelligence we no longer understand. But our people of the past knew,” she says.
In addition to her extensive and highly-praised oeuvre as a poet, Hogan is a renowned nonfiction writer. Her works include Dwellings, A Spiritual History of the Land; and The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. She is currently working on another novel.
Hogan says of her novels, “I am working on re-telling our past. Still, even with all the research, I am merely a writer trying to put it all together. We have all been brilliant people and it is an incredible world even now, ongoing in its creation and we are participants in it.”
Formerly a full professor at the University of Colorado, Hogan now lives in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, with “a wild mustang who turned out to be a Chickasaw pony” and a wild burro.
Sara Sue Hoklotubbe
Sara Sue Hoklotubbe
Hoklotubbe, Cherokee, grew up in northeastern Oklahoma near the banks of Lake Eucha, the location that is the setting for her mysteries. She worked at the University of Oklahoma for more than 20 years in finance. No wonder the heroine of her novels, Sadie Walela, is a banker!
Hoklotubbe describes her beginnings as a writer: “It was a long journey and I started late in life… I loved English in high school, but when I got to college my focus switched over to political philosophy. Out of college the first thing I needed to do was get a job, which I did in the banking business. That was 1974. I always thought I would do something else—this was just going tide me over for a little while.” Twenty years later she was a VP at the bank.
But the job took “so many hours a day I really couldn’t focus on anything else. Then my husband and I got married in 1997. When we moved [to Hawaii] I couldn’t get a job…. It was a new situation for me.” Given the opportunity to think about what she actually wanted to do, Hoklotubbe decided, “I’d really like to try to write. I was 45. I went to the community college and took some non-credit classes in creative writing. It was just like someone flipped on a switch inside me.”
She soon decided to try to write a book about how badly women are treated in the banking business. The book started out with a bank robbery. “But it just took a 90 degree turn and ended up completely different. I just wanted to tell a good story; I wasn’t trying to write a mystery…. I really liked the way [Tony Hillerman] was able to convey things about the Navajo culture and the way of life, and yet it was in a good story. I wanted to do that for my people. So I guess unconsciously that’s how I ended up writing a mystery.”
Hoklotubbe was named Writer of the Year by Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers in 2004 for her first novel, Deception on All Accounts(Sadie Walela Mystery), 2003. The American Café(Sadie Walela Mystery), 2011, has won several awards, including the 2012 WILLA Literary Award given by Women Writing the West, the 2012 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award for Mystery/Suspense, and the 2012 Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers award for Mystery of the Year. Hoklotubbe’s third mystery, Sinking Suspicions, is expected out in fall 2014, and she’s working on a fourth.
LeAnne Howe at Wadi Rum, Jordan, in 2011. (Photo by Jim Wilson)
LeAnne Howe
Howe, an enrolled Citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, has an extensive publications list that includes fiction, poetry, screenplays, creative non-fiction, plays and scholarly articles. She is a faculty member in the creative writing program, a professor of English and American Indian Studies, and an affiliated faculty member in the Theatre Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
“In teaching creative writing,” she says, “I try to advocate for stories that come from someplace inside the students themselves, the stories they carry—how we embody as tribal people our land, our landscape, our community. So in my mind these two prongs of teaching [creative writing and American Indian Studies] work together.”
She is working on her third novel, Memoir of a Choctaw Indian in the Arab Revolts, 1917 & 2011, set in Allen, Oklahoma, and Bilaad ash Sham, which she visited in 2010-2011. Bilaad ash Sham, she explains, was a “region that included what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, all the way over to Jerusalem.” The region was broken up after the Arab Revolt of 1921 when the British and French imposed the borders that created modern Middle Eastern countries. “There’s no such thing as Iraq, there’s no such thing as Syria in the way it’s shaped now. Those were imposed borders. It’s a very similar process to what happens to tribes here in terms of this is your border, this is where you live. These kinds of colonial processes are not dissimilar… I’m well-known for choosing time periods and comparing those time periods through the experience of tribal people, so this is another project in line with Shell Shaker and Miko Kings.”
Shell Shaker (2001), Howe’s first novel, won the American Book Award 2002, Before Columbus Foundation and was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award 2003. Howe was chosen as the Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year for Fiction in 2002. Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007) was selected as the Read-in Selection for Hampton University, 2009-2010. Howe is the recipient of the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.
Evelina Zuni Lucero
Evelina Zuni Lucero
Lucero, Isleta/Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, is winner of the 1999 Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas First Book Award for Fiction for her first novel, Night Sky, Morning Star, published in 2000. She is working on her second, Sovereign Seven, a story about Indian gaming.
Night Sky, Morning Star was developed from another novel that made the rounds but did not get picked up. Lucero took the one chapter in that book that everyone liked and built a story around it. The characters are based partly on people she knew in high school in Nevada, but the story is an act of imagination. “I had a lot of fun discovering who the characters were,” she says.
Lucero is chair of the Creative Writing Department at the Institute of American Indian Arts, following a stint as a journalist for tribal and national Indian news publications.
Her second novel is a challenge, says Lucero. “I thought that since I’ve written one novel, the second one should be easy, but it turns out that every book, every set of characters, has its own life. It took me a while to figure that one out.” This book is based on a short story she wrote in the late 1990s about the State of New Mexico’s conflict with the pueblo and Apache tribes over casinos with high stakes gaming. “It was a major conflict between the tribes and the state; eventually the tribes were successful.”
One of the historical figures Lucero encountered when she was doing research on the arrival of the Spanish in New Mexico was a “true life Native person who tricked the Spanish into thinking there were huge kingdoms of gold to the East as part of a plot of the Pueblo peoples to lure them onto the plains where they would travel until they got weary and tired—the idea was to do them in.” The Spanish, who first entered New Mexico in the 1540s looking for land to settle and to find riches, had heard stories of about seven cities of gold. The concocted story fit right into their expectations, Lucero says.
The novel, which Lucero describes as the “intersection of history, myth and the imagination,” marries the whole idea of modern-day casinos to the mythological Seven Cities of Gold, not coincidentally the basis for the name of one of the first casinos in northern New Mexico. “The casinos are another good trick that Native people came up with to lure non-Natives and get some enrichment and benefits out of that whole arrangement,” says Lucero, who hopes to finish the novel during her sabbatical next year.
Lee Maracle (Photo courtesy Columpa C. Bobb photography)
Lee Maracle
It was a dark and stormy night in Sardis, British Columbia, when Lee Maracle, Sto:Loh Nation, discovered she was a novelist as well a short-story writer. “There was a storm at the house and I was terrified,” she says. “I started writing so I wouldn’t hear the thunder. I had 80 pages written before anyone came home and the storm stopped.” She was so engrossed that “a tree fell on my house and I didn’t notice.” So far she has four novels to her credit: Sundogs: A Novel, 1992; Ravensong, 1995; Daughters are Forever, 2002; and Will’s Garden, 2002. She is working on the fifth, which will be a continuation of Ravensong, telling the story of the little child named Celia. “People kept asking what happened to her,” says Maracle.
Maracle teaches in the Aboriginal Studies Program and the Centre for Indigenous Theatre and she is the Traditional Teacher for First Nations House, all at the University of Toronto. She is one of the founders of the En’owkin International School of Writing in Penticton, B.C. In addition to her novels, she has published poetry and several non-fiction works.
Maracle is a member of the Red Power Movement and Liberation Support Movement; her political and social views are integral to her writing, she says. Sundogs is set during the Oka crisis between the Canadian government and the Mohawk Nation, while Ravensong deals with the flu epidemic of the 1950s, and Daughters tells of the healing that is possible within a dysfunctional family.
Among the points Maracle stresses is the importance of readers paying attention to emerging First Nations writers, a few of whom she mentioned. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Mississauga Nishnaabeg, has just published Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs, her debut collection of short stories. Cherie Dimaline, Ojibway and Métis, published her first novel, The Girl Who Grew A Galaxy, last June. Canadian poet Katherena Zermette, Metis, is the first Native woman writer to win the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, which she received for North End Love Songs.
Conceptual artist Cassandra Canady’s illustration of what the Red Curtain Foundation for the Arts in Marysville could look like. — image credit: Courtesy image.
MARYSVILLE — The Red Curtain Foundation for the Arts has entered the next phase of settling into its new home in Marysville, but it needs the public’s help to complete the transition.
Scott Randall, president of the Red Curtain Foundation for the Arts, started the nonprofit organization in June of 2009, and in June of 2013, the group moved into the former Dunn Lumber building in Marysville.
“The next step in the process came on Dec. 3 of last year, when I was doing a site walkthrough of the facility with the building commissioner and the fire marshall,” Randall said. “I asked them what we would need to do in order to start operating from this building sooner.”
The Foundation won’t be hosting concerts or plays from the Dunn Lumber building for a while yet, but if Red Curtain can raise the funds to get the facility in shape to meet the current regulations for fire safety and ADA compliance, then the group can provide a space for classes, meetings and other small events, to help it generate semi-regular revenue toward the down payment that needs to be made before more significant renovations are performed.
“We’re looking to add extras, to tear up pavement, and to put up and knock down walls, but we can’t do that now, because we don’t actually own the building yet,” Randall said, noting that the Red Curtain Foundation for the Arts is still operating under a lease agreement with Dunn Lumber. “In the meantime, because the facility has had hardly any updates since it was first built in 1967, we need to upgrade its fire system, make its restrooms ADA-compliant, put up new exit signs and install new doorhandles. And we need to do all of that immediately, before we can begin to offer even scaled-down programming on a regular basis.”
Beyond that, Randall eventually plans to install sprinkler systems and redesign the building’s exterior to include an enclosed space outdoors, but while conceptual artist Cassandra Canady has illustrated what Randall hopes the fully refurbished facility will ultimately look like, and engineer and architect Doug Walter has even drawn up a schematic for its interior layout, Randall himself knows that the Marysville community will need some persuading.
“What I’m finding is that folks in Marysville are very excited about having the Red Curtain Foundation for the Arts in their town, but they’re still saying, ‘Okay prove it,'” Randall said. “By hosting these smaller events to start with, we can prove that this center can be a benefit to the community. In an ideal world, it’d be nice to generate enough donations and revenue to have our facility fully ready for the art season this fall, maybe even by launching it with a concert, but if it takes us a while longer, at least by taking care of the immediate concerns, we can do enough good stuff to sustain ourselves and show some of what we’re capable of.”
SEATTLE — Today the U.S. Department of Interior recognized the Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership (PNAMP) for its conservation achievements focused on federally listed salmon species. The partnership was selected for a “Partnership in Conservation” award because it improves the scientific foundation for natural and cultural resource management and advances government-to-government relationships with Indian nations.
“The Department of the Interior is proud to recognize the accomplishments of those who are innovating and collaborating in ways that address today’s complex conservation and stewardship challenges,” Secretary Jewell said at an awards ceremony at the Interior headquarters in Washington today. “These partnerships represent the gold standard for how Interior is doing business across the nation to power our future, strengthen tribal nations, conserve and enhance America’s great outdoors and engage the next generation.”
For the past eight years, the Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership has promoted the recovery of Endangered Species Act listed salmon populations that represent a significant cultural resource for four Treaty Indian tribes and numerous non-Treaty tribes, as well as state commercial and sport fisheries. The partnership helps ensure program accountability and avoid duplication of efforts, which can pose problems for resource management. The partnership also plays an important role in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of water and biological monitoring and in management and exchange of data.
The “Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership demonstrates that the whole truly can be more than the sum of its parts,” said Max Ethridge, U.S. Geological Survey’s Regional Director for the Northwest, “with partners working together in a time of scarce resources, the winner is conservation.”
The Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership is a voluntary partnership of state, tribal and federal entities, supported by a small team of four USGS employees. Working to coordinate efforts of partners and other entities, the Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership strives to improve efficiency and effectiveness of aquatic monitoring programs in the Pacific Northwest. Ultimately, these efforts contribute to the restoration of salmon populations and protection of aquatic habitats throughout the region.
“Salmon recovery is a shared goal,” said Jennifer Bayer, USGS Biologist who oversees the Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership’s staff, “by focusing on common needs and sustaining collaboration among many entities, the Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership enhances partners’ contributions to salmon conservation, ultimately working towards more effective monitoring and data collection efforts.”
The Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership has created free, web accessible tools that help users discover and share data, document methods, and design and manage monitoring programs. The team also organizes workshops, standing workgroups and technical forums to share best practices for documentation, data sharing and data management related to salmon conservation.
The Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership has a unique geographic, technical and policy scope. The Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership supports partners across Washington, Oregon, Idaho and northern California; engages technical experts in water quality, water supply, energy resources, endangered species recovery, invasive species, ecological modeling and data management; and reports annually to federal, state and tribal executive leadership.
The Partners in Conservation Awards recognize outstanding examples of conservation legacies achieved when the Department of the Interior engages groups and individuals representing a wide range of backgrounds, ages and interests to work collaboratively to renew lands and resources. At the annual awards ceremony, the Department of the Interior celebrated conservation achievements that highlight cooperation among diverse federal, state, local and tribal governments; public and private entities; non-profit organizations; and individuals.
Jacob Lucas’ chain saw art is show on Wednesday, January 15, 2014. The Bonney Lake artist spent more than three weeks creating the tribute to the Seattle Seahawks and the 12th Man. (Joshua Trujillo, seattlepi.com)
Jacob Lucas has always been an artist. He has painted, worked with clay, blown glass, drawn and went to college for graphic design. But it is the magic he creates with a much less elegant tool that has been buzzing on social media and captured the attention of Seahawks fans recently.
Lucas spent more than three weeks finessing a Western red cedar log with his collection of 22 chainsaws. The stunning result of his work —a 7-foot-tall tribute to the Seahawks, the 12th Man and Native American culture — has been shared and “liked” online countless times.
“I’d like to see it on display in the CLink,” he said Wednesday after trucking the finely detailed creation to the Virginia Mason Athletic Center in Renton, where the Seahawks train.
The Bonney Lake artist first noticed chainsaw art at the Puyallup Fair when he was 13. He saved up money and purchased a saw. Unfortunately, it was stolen about two weeks later.
He mostly forgot about the unique art form until his grandmother paid for him to attend a class a decade later.
Since then his skill with a STIHL has led to a full-time career turning logs into masterpieces.
Lucas has 20 carvings lining the main drag in Bridgeport, Wash., near Omak. The award-winning carver has also been commissioned to create custom carvings.
Lucas hopes to have his Seahawks carving on display Friday at a rally for the team.
Click through the gallery above to see the detail work he put into the carving. You can see more of his work on his website.
For the second year in a row, Indian Health Service (IHS) leadership is confused how federal sequestration will impact its budget, leading to questions of responsibility and competency from Native-focused health officials.
The latest confusion centers on how the Special Diabetes Program for Indians (SDPI), a program created in 1997 by Congress for the prevention and treatment of diabetes in American Indian and Alaska Natives, will be affected under the new federal budget deal. The December congressional arrangement alleviates sequestration on many so-called discretionary Indian-focused programs, but it leaves cuts in place for some mandatory programs.
SDPI last year was classified as mandatory under White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) rules, so the program received a 2 percent cut, translating to $3 million. That reduction was able to be absorbed by IHS through an internal reshuffling of funds, according to agency officials last year.
This year, under the budget deal hammered out for 2014 by Democratic and Republicans congressional negotiators in December, mandatory programs would be subject to the same cut. As of December 24, 2013, IHS officials believed that SDPI would face the same cut as last year, and agency leadership was communicating that information to Indian health officials and to the press. An IHS spokeswoman told Indian Country Today Media Network by e-mail on December 24 that “SDPI has been sequestered by 2 percent again as other mandatory health programs.” A question at that time left unanswered was whether IHS would be able to absorb the $3 million shortfall, as it had in 2013.
Fast forward to mid-January, with IHS now telling Indian health officials that it doesn’t know if SDPI will be subject to sequestration in 2014. They also told Indian health officials on January 15 that the agency does not know when they would have more information on this issue.
When asked by ICTMN again on January 16 if SDPI would be subject to sequestration and if so whether IHS would be able to administratively pick up the slack as it did last year, Dianne Dawson, a spokeswoman for IHS, said that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) should be contacted for details on the 2014 budget.
OMB has not responded to requests for comment, but one thing is for sure: IHS leadership is no stranger to accusations of not knowing how federal sequestration affects their budget. Yvette Roubideaux, acting director of the agency, told Indian health officials at various tribal meetings and in letters throughout 2011 and early 2012 that “the worst-case scenario would be a 2 percent decrease from current funding levels” for IHS under sequestration, rather than the 9 percent that was forecasted for most federal agencies if the sequester went into effect. But that information was a misreading of the law, according to OMB, and IHS ended up being subject to higher levels of sequestration.
Indian health officials were outraged that Roubideaux had fed them wrong information, and they said it cost them the ability to prepare tribal budgets to help make up for the greater shortfall. They were also concerned with OMB’s interpretations of the law.
Questions over this issue and others involving lacking tribal consultation, transparency and funding issues have caused Democratic senators to hold up Roubideaux’ re-nomination to her director position. She has been reduced to acting capacity, which has reduced morale in the agency, according to Indian-focused officials who have discussed the situation with IHS staff.
Given the new confusion surrounding the SDPI program and sequestration in 2014, Indian health officials are again angry with IHS leadership and are demanding clarification.
“I am not sure what IHS is doing anymore; we have hardly any transparency when it comes to IHS budget issues with this director and administration,” said Jim Roberts, a policy analyst with the Northwest Portland Indian Health Board, when asked about the SDPI situation in December. “I’ve never seen budget and administrative transparency worse in the history of the agency despite its mantra and their espousal that this is their priority.”
From Roberts’ own reading of the law, he says that if Congress does its job and stays within the allocation caps reached under the December budget deal, there should not be a two percent reduction to the general IHS appropraition.
National Indian Health Board officials say they are investigating the situation with the agency.
Credit AP Photo/NOAA Fisheries Service, Candice Emmons FILE – In this file photo provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and shot Oct. 29, 2013, orca whales from the J and K pods swim past a small research boat on Puget Sound in view of downtown Seattle.
A conservation group is asking federal officials to protect endangered killer whales in the marine waters off the West Coast.
The Center for Biological Diversity on Thursday petitioned the National Marine Fisheries Service to designate critical habitat for orcas along the coast of Washington, Oregon and California.
The southern resident killer whales are frequently seen in Puget Sound during the summer, but little was known about their winter movements until recently.
Federal biologists have tracked the orcas as they traveled extensively along the coast, from Cape Flattery, Wash. to Point Reyes, Calif.
The group says those offshore areas should now be added as critical habitat. Such a designation would require federal officials to limit activities that harm the whales.
A message left with the federal agency was not immediately returned.
SNOQUALMIE — William Papazian, the former chairman of the Snoqualmie Gaming Commission, is suing three casino executives and two tribal council members for ousting fellow commissioners and replacing the entity responsible for independent oversight of gambling operations with themselves.
The litigation was flied in U.S. Federal Court last Friday.
The Snoqualmie Tribe, which is not specifically named in the lawsuit, denied Papazian’s claims and said it planned to help defent the accused.
Papazian chaired the Snoqualmie Gaming Commission for five years. He resigned November 27, 2013 as other employees with the body were being fired, he alleged.
The commission is required by federal law and through a gaming compact, or agreement, the tribe has with U.S. and state authorities. It is tasked to handle background checks of employees, ensure protocol is followed and keep an eye on casino floor operations. It is supposed to be, “independent” and “separate…from that of the Gaming Facility or Tribal Government,” according to the compact.
Papazian alleges he and his fellow commission members and employees were removed and replaced by the Snoqualmie Tribal Council so it could “run an illegal, unregulated gambling operation”.
Furthermore, he accuses the defendants of racketeering, money laundering and fraud.
Papazian, who lives in Arizona, declined to comment.
The Washington State Gambling Commission confirmed Wednesday it was told by the Snoqualmie Tribe its council was taking “interim control” of its own gaming commission, and that it had no immediate concerns.
A spokesperson with the National Indian Gaming Commission, which approves all gaming compacts, would not confirm or deny if it was investigating the Snoqualmie Casino.
The tribe would not say who is on its gaming commission now or when a new one would be selected.
In a statement, the tribe wrote, “It is disappointing to know that our former employee, Mr. Papazian, has chosen to file a baseless civil complaint. Mr. Papazian’s allegations are completely false and without merit. The Snoqualmie Tribe will vigorously defend this case and support the named defendants. This
complaint will not disrupt the workings of Tribal Government or Casino operations. We will continue to work hard to help our people.”
