Unauthorized fan merchandise surfaced on the web recently after the Florida State University Seminoles defeated the Auburn University Tigers at the BCS Championship last week.
Among the bevy of fan merch, one specific T-shirt has FSU officials rushing to see that it is discontinued.
The T-shirt, marketed as a “Florida State University 2013 National Champs Vintage Tee,” and manufactured by RowdyGentlemen.com, has the words, ‘SCALP ‘EM!,’ emblazoned across the chest. Below the text is an arrow and tomahawk.
Liz Maryanski, vice president for university relations, told Indian Country Today that on January 10, FSU officials began measures for an “emergency cease and desist” of all sales of the offensive T-shirt.
“We would never license that shirt,” Maryanski said. “That term is extremely derogatory and it’s offensive.”
Maryanski said that during such infringement issues, FSU employs a third party company, Collegiate Licensing, to address the matter. The company will then contact the unlicensed vendor directly, she said.
“Generally, they act very quickly,” she said.
Maryanski said that even if infringement were not an issue, FSU would work diligently to see that the T-shirt is eliminated.
“This is an infringement issue, but even it wasn’t, we would do everything in our power to shut it down,” she said.
Maryanski also said that FSU is “honored” to be able to use the Seminole name and is “very protective” of it.
Gary Bitner, spokesman for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, told Indian Country Today that the tribe is confident that FSU will make sure the shirt is discontinued.
“They (FSU) move quickly and effectively to do what needs to be done,” Bitner said, adding that the tee is a “terrible shirt.”
“It’s too bad that in 2014 we still see this kind of image and stereotypical presentation,” he said.
The Seminole Tribe’s Tribal Council authorized FSU to use its name and symbols and has an ongoing relationship with the university, Bitner said.
“The relationship between Florida State and the Seminole Tribe is one of mutual respect,” he said.
As of January 13, the T-shirt has not been taken down from the website and is still for sale.
Representatives of RowdyGentlemen.com did not respond to Indian Country Today’s request for comment.
An undefeated FSU beat Auburn 34-31 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, on January 6.
Organizers of the Olympic Heritage Celebration need a miracle. Their 2014 games are in jeopardy unless it snows hard and fast.
“Two years ago, we had no snow,” said Heidi Doyle, executive director of the Sierra State Parks Foundation, one of the program sponsors. “The night after the Eagle Wings danced, I believe after all that positive energy, we got unpredicted snow,” she said in a news release.
Doyle hopes that the Eagle Wings Dancers can perform a miracle this year, as there’s been sparser than usual snowfall in and around Tahoe, California.
“It worked for Walt Disney back in 1960, we hope it will work for us in 2014,” said
Doyle in a press release. Doyle was referring to the year that Squaw Valley, California was chosen to host the Winter Olympic Games. In 1960, the organizers, including Walt Disney, were nervous because the world was about to watch the games in a place that was having an unusually dry winter season. There was barely any snowfall.
Disney, who was chairman of the Pageantry Committee, planned the opening ceremony. He brought in tribal dancers to coax the snow to fall, and after the snow dance was performed, the weather changed. More than 12 feet of snow fell and the games went on as planned. Doyle hopes that the Eagle Wings Dancers can perform a bit of magic for the third time.
The Eagle Wings formed in 2006 to keep the Native American song a dance alive. The songs and dances they perform are more than 1,000 years old and indigenous to the Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe tribes.
“Our motto is ‘dancing in the steps of our ancestors,’” said Lois Kane, the director of the dance troupe in a news release. “We believe it is the spirit of the Old Ones that lead and guide us.” The Eagle Wing Dancers will perform in the opening ceremonies and dance in front of the iconic Tower of Nations at the park entrance of the park.
The opening ceremonies of the Olympic Heritage Celebration begin on January 11 at the Sugar Pine Point State Park in Tacoma, California. It’s a week-long series of skiing and historic commemorations that honor the Olympic games. The programs focus on the North Tahoe Olympic cultural history, as well as recreational events to promote the spirit of fair play and fitness.
Former Olympic athletes are also scheduled to attend, including Pete Wilson, a 1960 Bronze medal winner and Joseph William Tyler, who was a member of the 1980 U.S. bobsled team. Dignitaries will be on hand to light the caldron and tour the trails at the state park where the Olympic events took place 64 years ago.
“We encourage the community to join us as we honor our Olympic Heritage and dance for snow,” Doyle said.
A nearly-half-million-dollar grant will speed restoration of Alaska’s oldest Haida longhouse. The structure was first built 130 years ago.
Haida Chief Son-i-Hat built the original longhouse in the 1880s at the village of Kasaan. It’s on the eastern side of Southeast’s Prince of Wales Island, about 30 miles northwest of Ketchikan.
It was called Naay I’waans, The Great House. Many know it as The Whale House, for some of the carvings inside.
It deteriorated, as wooden buildings in the rain forest do. The Civilian Conservation Corps, a depression-era employment program, rebuilt it in the late 1930s.
Now, the house badly needs repair again.
An insect-infested house post is prepared for heat treatment to kill carpenter ants. (Organized Village of Kasaan)
“It’s a matter of our cultural revitalization, showing that we’re still here and part of these lands,” says Richard Peterson, president of the Tribal Council for the Organized Village of Kasaan.
“A lot of the building is still in really good condition. Some of the supports are what’s failing. I think we’re fortunate enough that we don’t need a total reconstruction, so we want to maintain as much as we can,” Peterson says.
An analysis by Juneau-based MRV Architects estimated full repairs would cost more than $2 million. A scaled-back plan totaled about $1.4 million. It listed several phases to be completed as funds came in.
And they have. In late November, the Anchorage-based Rasmuson Foundation awarded the project $450,000. Peterson says that, plus funds from the tribal government and its partners, is about enough to complete the work.
“So right now, we’re milling up the logs and they’re going to hand-adz all of the timbers. And we’re just going in and starting to secure up some of the corners that are dropping down. It’s been a really exciting project,” Peterson says.
The effort to stabilize the longhouse has been underway for around two years. But it picked up speed last summer.
Eric Hammer (front) and Harley Bell-Holter work in Kasaan’s carving shed. (Courtesy Organized Village of Kasaan)
The lead carver is Stormy Hamar, who is working with apprentices Eric Hamar, his son, and Harley Bell-Holter. Others volunteer.
Peterson says it’s an all-ages effort.“The great part is these young kids that are getting involved. And it’s across the lines. Native, non-Native, it doesn’t matter. There’s been a real interest by the youth there,” Peterson says.
Work continues through the winter. Peterson says the focus now is repairing or replacing structural elements so the longhouse doesn’t collapse.
The Whale House is already attracting attention. Independent travelers drive the 17-mile dirt road that starts near Thorne Bay. And Sitka-based Alaska Dream Cruises also stops in Kasaan, where the house is on the list of sights to see.
“Because it’s off-site, you’re not going to see any modern technology. There’s no cars driving by. You can really see how our people lived 200 years ago and experience that and look at those totems in a natural setting,” Peterson says. “It wasn’t put there for a park. This is how it was. And I think people really appreciate that.”
Without too many surprises, Peterson hopes work can be completed in around two years.
Then, he says, the tribe will host a celebration like the one Wrangell leaders put on last year when they finished the Chief Shakes Tribal House.
Scaffolding allows repairs to the Kasaan Whale House smokehole, which was damaged by rot. (Organized Village of Kasaan.)
Death. Family. Loss. Love. Wealth. Poetry. Spirituality. Genocide. Prejudice. Sherman Alexie’s new poetry collection, “What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned,” demonstrates the National Book Award-winning writer’s ability to tackle big themes, weaving them together in the context of his Indian identity and with his wry, unapologetic sense of humor.
And he wastes no time doing it. Alexie takes on all these topics in the collection’s first poem, the wide-ranging and powerful “Crazy Horse Boulevard,” always through the lens of his Indian identity (a member of the Spokane Tribe, he uses the term “Indian” almost exclusively). He addresses being Indian in a white world (“Most of the people who read this poem will be white people”), as well as within Indian culture, on and off the reservation (“Among my immediate family, I’m the only one who doesn’t live on the reservation. What does that say about me?”). The poem brings historical prejudices into a modern context, and Alexie calls things as he sees them, especially when it comes to the choices people make from what he sees as places of luxury (“If my sons, Indian as they are, contract some preventable disease from those organic, free-range white children and die, will it be legal for me to scalp and slaughter their white parents?”).
The focus on racial and cultural identity comes through strongest in the book’s first section. “Happy Holidays” pointedly discusses the complicated relationship modern Indians have with American holidays. “Sonnet, with Slot Machines” wrestles with the politics of Indian casinos and issues of gambling.
“Slot Machines” is one of many so-called “sonnets” in the book; the poems comprise the second section and are scattered throughout the others. In labeling these poems sonnets, Alexie initiates a conversation about form, forgoing the traditional 14-line rhyme and metrical structure and instead following formulas of his own. This reinvention of form allows Alexie to stay true to his own voice, never sacrificing his natural vocabulary for the sake of someone else’s definition of “poetic.” Yet Alexie pays homage to formal poetry and to his literary forbears by recognizing the significance of the form’s constraints while giving it his own spin.
Whatever form he uses, Alexie stays true, too, to his own style of storytelling. And “What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned” is, at its core, a book of stories, told piecemeal, which hit the reader with their poignancy in the way Alexie weaves the seemingly disparate pieces together. In “Sonnet, with Tainted Love” he does this with a missing persons case, nightmares and the movie “Dirty Dancing.” “Hell” links Dante, Jimmy Durante, Moses and a fear of heights.
At 156 pages, it’s lengthy for a poetry collection, and the book does drag at times. (“Phone Calls from Ex-Lovers,” for example, probably doesn’t need to list all top 100 songs from 1984. Surely 10 would have made the point.)
But the slow moments are overcome by the tenderness of “Steel Anniversary,” by the undeniable momentum of “The Naming Ceremony,” and by the sledgehammer truths that catch us off-guard, the laugh-out-loud surprises and the utter honesty with which Alexie delivers it all.
“What I’ve Stolen” creates a world that, to borrow a line from “Sonnet, with Tainted Love,” “is equal parts magic and loss,” and it’s a book worth savoring to the final line.
By Mark Gnadt | House Democratic Caucus 01/10/2014
Alaska Native News
On Thursday, Representative Charisse Millett (R-Anchorage), Representative Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins (D-Sitka), Representative Benjamin Nageak (D-Barrow), and Representative Bryce Edgmon (D-Dillingham) announced they are pre-filing the Alaska Native Language Bill to make each of the Native languages in Alaska an official language of the state.
In current state law, English is Alaska’s only official language. This bill would expand the list to include Iñupiaq, Siberian Yupik, Central Alaskan Yup’ik, Alutiiq, Unangax̂, Dena’ina, Deg Xinag, Holikachuk, Koyukon, Upper Kuskokwim, Gwich’in, Tanana, Upper Tanana, Tanacross, Hän, Ahtna, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian.
“Losing a language is losing a way of understanding the world,” said Kreiss-Tomkins. “We hope this legislation will add even more momentum to the revitalization of Alaska Native languages.”
“Native culture enriches the lives of Alaskans in so many ways,” said Millett. “Naming Alaska’s twenty indigenous languages as official languages of the state of Alaska demonstrates our respect and admiration for their past, current, and future contributions to our state.”
“This legislation will highlight the importance of preserving and revitalizing the rich and diverse cultural legacy inherent in Alaska Native languages,” said Edgmon, chairman of the House Bush Caucus. “We recently celebrated our 50th year of statehood. In another 50 years I would like to see the many languages of our first Alaskans playing a vibrant role in the lives of people all over the state.”
“I want to thank Representative Kreiss-Tomkins for starting the process of the passage of this bill. We, the co-sponsors, feel this bill will be a positive and long overdue formal legislative recognition of all the Native languages still spoken in this great state of ours and the people who still speak their own language,” said Nageak.
Nageak continued, “Those of us who still speak and write our language want to make sure that all Native languages in the state of Alaska do not die off and want them passed on to the younger generation and the generations that will come in the near and distant future. The first words I ever spoke in my life were Iñupiaq words. My generation spoke only Iñupiaq when we were growing up and did not learn to speak English until the age of 6 years old when we started school as kindergartners. Our generation has struggled with and has been somewhat complicit in not speaking our languages when we became parents, therefore the majority of the generation we parented does not speak or write the different Native languages that were spoken entirely by Native people from generations past. We, as prime co-sponsors, feel that this bill is a start in making sure that future generations of Native speakers multiply until someday all of our Native people will once again be totally fluent in their own Native tongue with the added capability of speaking the English language.”
Making these languages official languages of the state of Alaska is a symbolic gesture to acknowledge their importance to Alaskans and the state’s heritage. Passage of the bill will not require public signs and documents to be printed in multiple languages, and it will create no additional costs to the state.
The bill will be assigned a bill number and released on Friday, January 10. It will be read into the official record and assigned committees of referral on the first day of the upcoming legislative session, January 21, 2014.
Unaffected is the privately owned MV Coho ferry between Port Angeles and Victoria, which already has begun its winter schedule.
The Coho makes one round trip daily — departing from Port Angeles at 8:20 a.m. — until the vessel goes out of service Jan. 20 for its annual two-week maintenance.
Move aside, Canadian federal fisheries and oceans officials. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s administration has decided that the nation’s fossil-fuel-friendly energy regulators would do a better job of protecting fish in streams and lakes that cross paths with gas and oil pipelines. Northwest Coast Energy News has the scoop:
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has handed responsibility for fish and fish habitat along pipeline routes over to the National Energy Board. …
DFO and NEB quietly announced a memorandum of agreement on December 16, 2013, that went largely unnoticed with the release three days later of the Joint Review Panel decision on Northern Gateway and the slow down in news coverage over the Christmas holidays. …
Enbridge no longer has to apply to DFO for permits to alter fish habitat along the Northern Gateway route. …
Fish and fish habitat along [that] pipeline is now the responsibility of the Alberta-based, energy friendly National Energy Board.
This looks to be another horrifying step in Harper’s efforts to quash any science (or common sense) that might slow down the extraction and transportation of gas and oil in Canada.
NEAH BAY –– The U.S. Department of the Interior will soon offer to buy land from individual property owners on the Makah reservation under a new federal program aimed at helping tribes consolidate ownership.
The Makah reservation is the second in the nation to be part of Interior’s Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations.
Over the next 10 years, Interior will use $1.9 billion to buy land once allotted to tribal members that has ownership that has become “fractionated” among heirs of the original owners — meaning some plots are owned by hundreds of people.
The land will then be put into a trust for the tribes.
Dale Denney, Realty officer for the Makah, said the tribe has been allocated $2.55 million to buy fractionated lots within the tribe’s 30,000-acre reservation.
The tribe now has 14 allotments it has appraised to buy under the program.
Under the Dawes Act of 1887, tribal members were given allotments of land by the federal government, Denney said.
As those original owners died, the land was often split among heirs who over time have taken ownership of mere fractions of property.
One particular piece of allotment land now is now owned by 353 owners, Denney said.
“We’re talking places where people own just a few square feet now,” Denney said.
Genevieve Giaccardo, tribal relations adviser for Interior, said the first purchase offers under the program were made late last month to members of the Oglala Sioux tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southern South Dakota.
“It’s exciting to see the numbers with the Makah and Pine Ridge and seeing how things are beginning to work out,” Giaccardo said.
“We have a lot of work to do and a lot of logistics to work out. But these tribes have done a great job of finding ways to make this work.”
Tribal and U.S. officials are hosting a pair of meetings in the Makah Marina conference room, 1321 Bayview Ave. in Neah Bay, on Monday and Tuesday.
Monday’s meeting runs from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday’s runs from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
The program eventually will be expanded and offered to 150 tribes across the nation, including others on the North Olympic Peninsula.
Meetings to explain the program to tribes in Washington will be Thursday and Friday, Jan. 16 and 17, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Philip Starr Building at the Muckleshoot Wellness Center, 39015 172nd Ave. S.E. in Auburn.
Giaccardo said convoluted ownership complicates decisions about use of land and resources as thousands of owners have to be consulted before decisions can be made.
“This has all been going on for 125 years,” she said. “So there’s a lot of heirs to get in contact with. That’s where the tribes are going to have a lot of work to do.”
The buyback stems from the $3.4 billion class-action settlement in 2012 of a suit brought by Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet woman who brought suit against the U.S. government for mismanaging royalties from oil, gas, grazing and timber rights on tribal lands.
The Makah previously received $25 million from that settlement.
Makah Tribal Chairman T.J. Greene testified to the U.S. Senate last month about the tribe’s buyback plans.
Greene said 1,158 letters were sent to owners of the most fractionated allotments to inquire about buying the land.
Through meetings with various interest groups, he said, the tribe decided to focus its purchase on lands that will provide opportunity through timber and other economic development, as well as trying to purchase sacred grounds at Tsooes, a coastal village south of Cape Flattery.
Greene said the 14 lots ready for the buyback were appraised at a total value of $1.5 million.
The tribe has another 12 or 13 allotments prioritized for appraisal.
YAKIMA, Wash. — The Yakama Nation is considering an unprecedented move in its fight against legalized marijuana that could have implications for 10 Central Washington counties.
With a marijuana ban already in place on the Yakama reservation, tribal representatives now say they’ll fight the state to keep marijuana businesses from opening anywhere on ceded lands, which constitute one-fifth of the state’s land mass.
The tribe’s options include suing the state in federal court if no compromise can be reached, Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chairman Harry Smiskin said.
“We’re merely exercising what the treaty allows us to do, and that is prevent marijuana grows (and sales) on those lands,” Smiskin said.
Under the Yakama Treaty of 1855 with the federal government, the Yakama Nation was to have exclusive use of the 1.2 million-acre reservation and maintain fishing, hunting and food-gathering rights on more than 12 million acres of ceded land. The tribe has successfully taken court action against federal and state entities as well as private interests in the past to defend those rights, but most of those cases have been directly tied to the tribe’s access to natural and cultural resources.
“To my knowledge, this would be the first time” the tribe has sought to prevent the implementation of a state law on all ceded land, said George Colby, an attorney for the Yakama Nation.
“The tribe’s stance is if you don’t fight, you don’t get to win,” Colby said.
The tribe expects to file more than 600 objections with the state and federal governments against license applicants located in the 12 million-acre area that includes land in 10 Central Washington counties, Colby said. About 300 of those complaints have already been filed, he added.
The ceded area spans from the Columbia River on the Oregon border to all of Chelan County in the north and from the eastern slopes of the Cascades across the Columbia River to as far west as parts of Whitman County. The area encompasses the cities of the Upper and Lower Yakima Valleys, Wenatchee, Ellensburg, Goldendale and Pasco, although not Richland or Kennewick.
Colby and Smiskin draw comparisons to the tribe’s long fight to keep alcohol off the reservation. They say the tribe has had an equally unpleasant history with marijuana use, and that the plant, which was effectively banned by the federal government through a series of campaigns and legislation in the 1930s, never played a traditional role in Yakama culture.
“Aside from the taxation of marijuana, I don’t see any benefits from it,” Smiskin said.
Moves by the tribal government a decade ago to enforce a 150-year-old alcohol ban on the reservation have been complicated by the fact that most of the property in the cities of Toppenish and Wapato are deeded land owned by nontribal members, including proprietors of bars and stores.
In that case, a 2001 opinion issued by U.S. Attorney Jim Shively in Spokane said that the Yakamas’ ban would probably not be enforceable in cities on the reservation.
In addition to the ban on marijuana businesses, it also remains illegal to possess marijuana for personal use on the Yakama reservation. Colby said the fact that marijuana remains illegal under federal law also entitles them to challenge it on ceded lands.
But the author of the 2012 voter-approved initiative that legalized marijuana, Alison Holcomb, said she doesn’t see a legal basis for the tribe’s opposition to marijuana businesses on ceded lands.
“I think they run into the issue of not having standing to, in essence, bring suit on behalf of the federal government,” said Holcomb, the criminal justice director of the American Civil Liberties Union Washington chapter. “The federal government at this time has shown it has no intention of trying to stop the law.”
In August, the U.S. Justice Department sent a memo to Washington and Colorado saying it would not stop the implementation of laws legalizing the recreational use of marijuana. The federal government’s use of prosecutorial discretion could be rescinded if the states fail to implement a robust system of enforcement to prevent interstate trafficking and access to minors, according to the memo.
In October the state Liquor Control Board established a rule that it would not issue a license to any business located on federal lands, such as a tribal reservation, a federal park or military installation. The rule does not address ceded lands, and on Friday a spokesman said the agency wasn’t ready to comment on that issue.
“The reality is we haven’t seen a lawsuit,” Liquor Control Board spokesman Mikhail Carpenter said. “Until we do, it would be premature for us to comment.”
A spokeswoman for the state Attorney General’s Office was also unable to comment on the issue Friday.
In the coming weeks, the Attorney General’s Office will issue an opinion on whether cities and counties have a right to ban marijuana growing, processing and retail businesses from their jurisdictions. Because the opinion is a response to a Liquor Control Board inquiry specifically related to counties and municipalities, it is not expected to address tribal rights issues.
“Within the reserved area, it’s not even a contest as to whether marijuana is illegal,” Colby said. “Next is the ceded area.”
Holcomb said she supports the tribe’s right to ban marijuana businesses on the reservation. However, she said it’s unfortunate tribal leaders don’t recognize the disproportionate effects national marijuana prohibition has had on minorities in terms of criminal convictions.
Illegal marijuana grows by cartels on reservation lands and federal forest lands are also the result of prohibition, she said.
“U.S. marijuana prohibition is directly responsible for the fact that there are multinational criminal organizations setting up marijuana grows on reservation lands and ceded lands,” Holcomb said. “They pose a danger to members exercising their hunting, gathering and fishing rights in those lands.”
Smiskin said the tribe will continue to put license applicants, the state and federal governments on notice that marijuana businesses aren’t welcome on the ceded lands. He said no entities have approached the Yakama Nation to discuss their stance and potential legal challenge.
“If we can’t come to an agreement, then there is always that potential it’s going to get litigated,” Smiskin said.
Golfers and other visitors to the Salish Cliffs Golf Course on the Squaxin Island Indian Reservation are greeted by two Coast Salish totem poles that frame sweeping, territorial views of the Kamilche Valley.
A welcome pole, right, originally carved for the Port of Olympia 15 years ago, has found a home at the Salish Cliffs Golf Course on the Squaxin Island Indian Reservation, shown Friday. TONY OVERMAN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
The shorter — 36 feet — and less colorful carving is a welcome pole that has a long and contentious history, dating to 1997 when the Port of Olympia contracted with Squaxin Island tribal member, carver and fisherman Doug Tobin to carve a totem pole for the port’s new Port Plaza on the shores of Budd Inlet.
Along the way to completion, the pole’s fate became entangled in Tobin’s past, which included a manslaughter rap in a 1986 murder-for-hire scheme that took the life of Olympia’s Joanne Jirovec.
I visited the welcome pole this week with Russ Lidman, a retired Seattle University professor, Olympia resident and president of Temple Beth Hatfiloh.
Lidman for years used the welcome pole case history as a teachable moment for students in the university’s master’s program in public administration. A retrospective review of the case looks like a television drama co-starring whipsawed port commissioners, a port director torn in several directions, angry citizens, the local newspaper that early on gave the story less attention, and a talented Native American artist, who happens to be a habitual criminal.
“It’s a really good case study from the point of view of public administration,” Lidman said. “Real screw-ups like this require a lot of actors dropping the ball.”
Examples include:
• The Port of Olympia in the 1990s lacked a transparent, formal process for spending money on public art. They settled on Tobin to carve a Coast Salish welcome pole for the Port Plaza without fully vetting the artist’s criminal background or considering the potential for backlash from friends of Joanne Jirovec.
• The Olympian didn’t write in detail about the contract, or the artist and his criminal past, before the contract was signed. If I remember right — and I covered the port at the time — the newspaper, along with port officials and Squaxin Island tribal leaders, figured Tobin had served his time — albeit less than six years — on the manslaughter charge and deserved a second chance.
• Tobin, who had plenty of help carving the pole — he did only about 15 percent of the work — missed his contract deadline of February 1998 and didn’t complete the pole until 2000. Months would go by without any work performed on the pole. He missed deadlines for performance payments spelled out in the contract, but port officials figured there would be more to lose than gain by canceling the contract.
Later, it became clear why Tobin fell so far behind. While Tobin was under contract to the port, he was also the ringleader of a major geoduck and Dungeness crab poaching ring in South Puget Sound.
• The back of the pole needed to be hollowed out and strengthened with a beam and structural supports to keep it from cracking. It sat enshrouded in a port warehouse for another two years.
That gave state and federal fish and wildlife enforcement officers time to build their poaching case against Tobin, someone they had used as an undercover informant for years before they knew the full extent of his own criminal enterprise.
In February 2002, the port was close to erecting the welcome pole. But on March 18, Tobin was arrested for the theft of geoducks valued at $1.2 million. In 2003, he received a 14-year prison term, nearly twice his sentence in the Jirovec case, and the stiffest poaching penalty in state history.
Soon after the news of Tobin’s arrest broke, friends of Joanne Jirovec descended on the port, demanding that the port scrap its plans to erect the pole to welcome people to the Olympia waterfront. They called the plan an insult to the memory of the slain woman.
• The Port Commission appointed a six-member citizens panel for advice. The panel voted 4-2 to install the pole, but the port commissioners, feeling the heat from the friends of Jirovec, ignored the recommendation.
Port Executive Director Nick Handy tried to sell the pole to the Squaxins, but they declined. Eventually the pole was sold for $30,352 in 2004 to a Seattle art collector, who in turn donated it to the Burke Museum of Natural Culture and History at the University of Washington.
Museum officials initially planned to erect the pole on the university campus, but they, too, deferred action. As the pole sat in limbo, Squaxin tribal members scrubbed every inch of the pole with spruce boughs to cleanse it of any negative energy associated with its past.
In 2005, the museum’s Native American Advisory Board recommended that museum officials contact the Squaxin Island Tribe to see whether they would like to borrow the pole.
The pole sat in storage at museum for several years. Finally, in 2011, the tribe and the museum entered into a 99-year loan agreement, which is reviewed every two years. The tribe brought the pole to the reservation and added it to the entrance to its new golf course.
The welcome pole and adjoining totem pole stand alongside a flag pole that flies both Old Glory and a Squaxin Island tribal flag. There are no inscriptions or plaques describing either pole’s story.
Tribal council member Ray Peters talked to me briefly Thursday about the welcome pole. I think he’d rather talk about the award-winning golf course. But he did shed a little light on the tribal council’s decision to embrace the pole.
“The pole isn’t Doug Tobin’s pole,” Peters said. “A lot of notable artists had a hand in carving and designing the pole.”
Several people familiar with the pole said they were glad it finally found a home, including former Secretary of State Ralph Munro, who served on the port advisory committee all those years ago, and voted to erect the pole at the Port Plaza.
“I’m glad to see the pole up,” he said. “For some people it evokes bad memories, but it’s a beautiful piece of Squaxin art that has inspired a lot of young tribal carvers.”
“We’re pleased that the pole has found a home,” added Burke Museum director Julie Stein.
“I’m glad it’s away from the university,” said Barbara Brecheen a good friend of Jirovec, upon learning the fate of the pole. “I’m surprised the tribe wanted it, but I guess it makes sense.”
I’ve thought long and hard about this column ever since I learned what happened to the welcome pole. I’ve come to the conclusion that the public has a right to know what happened to it. Public money was used to carve it. I’ve also concluded it’s time to separate the art from the artist, to let the art have a life of its own.
“I hope your column doesn’t open up old wounds,” Peters said.
I hope so, too. I don’t think it will.
John Dodge: 360-754-5444 jdodge@theolympian.com
Read more here: http://www.theolympian.com/2014/01/12/2926674/benighted-totem-pole-finds-a-home.html#storylink=cpy
In current state law, English is Alaska’s only official language. This bill would expand the list to include Iñupiaq, Siberian Yupik, Central Alaskan Yup’ik, Alutiiq, Unangax̂, Dena’ina, Deg Xinag, Holikachuk, Koyukon, Upper Kuskokwim, Gwich’in, Tanana, Upper Tanana, Tanacross, Hän, Ahtna, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian.
