Tulalip News

Sacajawea: If Not For Her, We Could Be Saluting the British Flag

sacajawea-statue-salmon-idaho — Jack McNeel
The Sacajawea statue in Salmon, Idaho is in the ancestral homelands of the Lemhi Shoshone people.

12/6/13 ICTMN

Few women in U.S. history have had more influence on the nation’s history than the young Lemhi Shoshone woman, Sacajawea. It’s very likely that Lewis and Clark would never have reached the Pacific Ocean had it not been for her help. White settlement would have been different. Indian wars throughout the western half of the country would have been altered. We might even be saluting the British flag rather than the American flag. Sacajawea’s role was gigantic.

Innumerable statues have been created of her, she has graced postage stamps and the copy gold coin bears her resemblance. Despite that, there is great confusion and disagreement about this remarkable woman. No photos exist of her, so images and statues reflect what their creator thinks she would have looked like. There is disagreement about the spelling and pronunciation of her name, even where she was born and certainly where she died. But there is no disagreement as to her role in U.S. history. The Lemhi Shoshone people claim her, but others disagree.

Sacajawea was 11 or 12 when she was captured by the Hidatsa. A couple years later she married Charbonneau. When he was hired by Lewis and Clark as an interpreter she was included because they thought she might prove helpful when they reached her homelands in what is now Montana and Idaho. Four years had elapsed since her capture so she was probably 16 when she joined the expedition.

Dr. Orlan Svingen, a historian, and professor at Washington State University, has worked with the descendents of Sacajawea, the Agai Dika people, since 1991. “Sacajawea, carrying a child, speaking Shoshone, talking to a Frenchman… She disarmed anybody because she was a woman with a child,” he said. “On top of that, when she came to this country (western Montana) she knew people and could speak with them.”

Perhaps her first major influence on the expedition came in early May when the pirogue (boat) she was in with Charbonneau at the helm capsized. Lewis describes Charbonneau, writing, “Charbono cannot swim and is perhaps the most timid waterman in the world.” The boat contained instruments, books, medicine, much merchandise, “in short almost every article indispensably necessary to further the views, or insure the success of the enterprise,” Captain Lewis wrote.

Sacajawea was calm despite having her newborn son with her and was able to retrieve many scientific instruments and books. Their medical supplies were lost but they were able to continue westward. Without her help, at that point, the expedition would have been much more difficult and less successful.

According to Svingen, well before they reached what is now Idaho, Sacajawea said, “This is the home of my people.” It was August 8, 1805. They soon met some of her own, the Lemhi Shoshone people. The expedition was in desperate need of horses, winter was approaching and a massive mountain range separated them from the Columbia River and the Pacific coast. With the aid of Sacajawea as both an interpreter and friend to both the expedition and the tribe, horses were obtained and a guide, an elder they called Toby, was provided to lead them over the mountains. Without the tribe’s help and Sacajawea’s assistance, this likely would have ended Lewis and Clark’s exploration.

“This was huge!” Svingen said about Sacajawea and the tribe’s help. “This was like atomic energy! This was enormous!” Had Lewis and Clark not reached the Pacific, they would not have been able to claim the land for the United States.

Many questions will likely remain unanswered but few will argue the importance of Sacajawea to the Lewis and Clark expedition or to her impact on U.S. history.

Oglala Sioux Tribe evicting tribal ranchers to make way for bison park

December 5, 2013 Rapid City Journal

Andrea J. Cook Journal staff

Sandra Buffington has spent her life working to carve a home and ranching business out of the sparse grasslands around the South Unit of Badlands National Park.

But she and other Lakota ranchers face the possibility of losing their grazing rights to make way for a huge bison reserve planned by the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

Buffington, who is in her late 60s, runs her cattle year-round on 11,000 acres of leased land. It’s land that her father once leased. She also owns 80 acres where her home sits.

Many of the ranchers in the path of the planned reserve for a herd of 1,000 bison own small sections of land close to or adjacent to the land they lease.

The letter revoking Buffington’s permission to continue grazing also reminded her that the tribe also has the power to condemn her own land, land that has been in her family for many years.

“The land I’m leasing is what my father leased,” Buffington said.

Without the leased land, she would have to sell her cattle. A grandson’s dream of some day operating the ranch would be lost, she said.

Read rest of the article here.

Winona LaDuke: Keep USDA Out of Our Kitchens

By Tanya H. Lee, ICTMN

Native American author, educator, activist, mother and grandmother Winona LaDuke, Anishinaabekwe, is calling on tribes to relocalize food and energy production as a means of both reducing CO2 emissions and of asserting tribes’ inherent right to live in accordance with their own precepts of the sacredness of Mother Earth and responsibility to future generations.

She said during a recent presentation on climate change at Harvard University, “We essentially need tribal food and energy policies that reflect sustainability. Tribes [as sovereign nations] have jurisdiction over food from seed to table and we need to take it or else USDA will take it…. The last thing you want is USDA telling you how to cook your hominy, that you can’t use ashes in it …. I am the world-renowned, or reservation-wide renowned, beaver tamale queen. So who’s going to come to my house and [inspect the beaver]? I don’t want USDA in my food. I want us to exercise control over our food and not have them saying we can’t eat what we traditionally eat.”

LaDuke was talking about tribal food sovereignty.

Winona LaDuke of White Earth, Jackie Francke of First Nations Development Institute and Julie Garreau, executive director of the Cheyenne River Youth Project, at the first meeting of the NAFSA founding council. (Courtesy First Nations Development Institute)

Neither the United States Department of Agriculture nor the Food and Drug Administration is likely to turn up in your family’s kitchen, but federal policies have a lot to say about what food products are allowed to get into that kitchen in the first place. Antibiotics and growth hormones in the meat supply, vast harvests of corn, rice or wheat cultivated from the same genetic stock, genetically modified organisms—be they corn or soy or fish–and preservatives added to food during processing are primarily under the control of the USDA and FDA. As are the regulations about what foods can be served by tribes at day care centers, schools and senior centers, not to mention those on how food intended for commercial markets must be grown and processed.

Of particular concern right now is the 2011 federal Food Safety Modernization Act, which increases regulation and oversight of food production in an effort to prevent contamination. If the rules pertaining to the law are not changed in response to public comments, some of the federal government’s regulatory and inspection responsibilities will devolve to state governments, a direct threat to tribal sovereignty, according to First Nations Community Development Institute Senior Program Officer Raymond Foxworth, Navajo. “The [historic] loss of food system control in Indian Country is highly correlated with things like the loss of land, the loss of some aspects of culture related to agricultural processes, and … some pretty negative health statistics [including obesity, diabetes and lifespan]. It’s our belief that food sovereignty is one solution to combat some of these negative effects, be it the negative health statistics, the loss of culture or the loss of land.”

Harley Coriz, director of the Santo Domingo Senior Center, inside of the center’s new greenhouse. (Courtesy First Nations Development Institute)

The institute has been instrumental in establishing the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance under its Native American Food System Initiative. The alliance will be a national organization focused on networking, best practices and policy issues. The founding members of NAFSA “have been working on trying to pressure the FDA into initiating tribal consultations related to FSMA.”

The alliance, in the works for more than a decade, recently got start-up funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. FNCDI contracted with the Taos County Economic Development Corp. to coordinate its establishment. Directors Pati Martinson and Terrie Bad Hand convened a group of 16 people who have been working on food systems at the grassroots level to form a founding council. That group had its first face-to-face meeting in October.

Among the founding council members is Dana Eldridge, Navajo, formerly on the staff at Diné College and now an independent consultant and would-be farmer, who has done extensive work in analyzing food systems for the Navajo Nation. One of her main concerns is genetically modified organisms. GMOs, she says, threaten both the ownership of Native seeds and the spiritual aspects of food. “Corn is very sacred to us—it’s our most sacred plant. We pray with corn pollen–in our Creation story we’re made of corn—so what does it mean that this plant has been turned into something that actively harms people?”

Children at the Akwesasne Freedom School in New York near the Canadian border work in the their gardens in a farm-to-school project led by Kanenhi:io Ionkwaiontonhake. Much of the food grown in the gardens goes directly to the school for meals. Two teachers even instruct the older kids in the pre-K through grade 8 school in how to can and store their food, according to Elvera Sargent, Mohawk, who has been at the school since 1995 and who is a member of the NAFSA founding council. (Courtesy Akwesasne Freedom School)

Eldridge says food sovereignty is also important because it is a way to begin to address the trauma colonization has inflicted on Native people. “What I’ve learned during this food research is you can’t produce food by yourself. You need people, you need family, you need community and relationships, so a lot of it is about rebuilding community and reconnecting with the land and I think that’s a very important healing process for our people.”

The Taos County Economic Development Corp. has found that one way to keep USDA and FDA out of your kitchen is to invite them in. When regulators amped up their enforcement of regulations in relation to Native commercial food enterprises in northern New Mexico, TCEDC built a 5,000-square-food commercial kitchen where people could process their crops and learn directly from USDA inspectors what the regulations were. Says Martinson, “The food center was our way of modeling and bringing forward local healthy food through helping those people become actual businesses and entrepreneurs.” In 2006, TCEDC added a mobile slaughtering unit. Housed in a tractor trailer truck, the MSU travels out to small ranches where USDA inspectors oversee the slaughter of livestock—”bison, beef, sheep, goats and the occasional yak,” says Bad Hand–intended for commercial sale. The meat is then brought back to the center for cutting and packaging, again under federal oversight.

There is an irony to all this federal oversight of food production in sovereign Native nations, says Martinson. Traditional Native food growing, harvesting and processing principles kept people healthy for millennia before USDA even existed. The food contamination that FSMA is intended to prevent is a consequence of the industrialization of food production. “All these scares that you hear about, e. coli or salmonella making people really sick, if you trace those back, they come from huge packing plants, from industry.

A young girl at Cochiti Youth Experience (at Cochiti Pueblo) working in the garden. (Courtesy First Nations Development Institute)

“One of the things that I think Native people recognize and have passed down culturally is that you need to have human beings within food production ecosystems for all of those reasons—safety, quality, a relationship with your food. The principles of safe food are indigenous and inherent in Native communities,” Martinson says.

The answer to “What’s for dinner?” has profound implications for the well-being of Native American tribes. Tribal food sovereignty could mean the difference between continuing to retain (or regain) language, land, religious precepts, traditional lifeways and physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health or losing them.

Muckleshoot Tribal College Holiday Bazaar, Dec 18

Festivities will include medicine making classes, ornamental decorating workshops, gingerbread house workshops, local vendors, food and beverages and much more!

Muckleshoot Tribal College

39811 Auburn-Enumclaw Rd SE, Auburn WA 98092

Revisiting racism

Ravalli comments leave tribal elders thinking of the past

Missoula Independent

by Jessica Mayrer December 5, 2013

Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribal elder Tony Incashola Sr. says that despite experiencing racism from the time he was a child growing up in the 1950s on the Flathead Indian Reservation, he couldn’t help feeling surprised by a Ravalli County official’s portrayal of American Indians during a public meeting last month as drunken lawbreakers.

“I guess I shouldn’t be,” Incashola, 67, says. “I’ve lived with that all of my life … When I was a kid, it was like standing at a department store on the outside looking in. You see the non-Indian children having fun. You felt like an outsider, that you weren’t welcome, because you didn’t dress right and you had a different color.”

Incashola, who serves as director of the Salish-Pend d’Orielle Culture Committee, has dedicated much of his life to fostering an understanding of indigenous ways. Education breeds familiarity, he says. Familiarity helps break down the fear that breeds racism. Efforts such as his are paying off. Incashola says that racism is less apparent than when he was young. That makes the Nov. 20 meeting in Ravalli County all the more troubling.

The meeting involved a discussion between CSKT delegates and the Ravalli County Board of Commissioners about how best to care for a historic Bitterroot Valley property known as Medicine Tree that the Salish have considered sacred for hundreds of years. CSKT wants to transfer the property from tribal ownership into federal trust with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. CSKT representatives stated that the 58-acre parcel is central to Salish creation stories, ones that detail how “Coyote,” a being imbued by the creator with special powers, made the land “safe for humans yet to come,” Incashola says.

When explaining the importance of such a transfer, the CSKT say that the Medicine Tree parcel provides a connection to indigenous history—a link that helps preserve a strong sense of tribal identity. The CSKT add that the transaction will help grow their land base and, therefore, give them a more powerful voice when negotiating their rights and responsibilities with government agencies.

CSKT attorney Teresa Wall-McDonald told the Independent that placing land into trust helps the tribes gain back losses accrued when the federal government opened the Flathead Reservation to non-native homesteaders in 1910. Between 2009 and August 2013 alone, the CSKT placed approximately 81,000 acres into trust.

“Part of the process of restoring our homeland includes restoring the land,” Wall-McDonald says. “It is part of rebuilding our homeland, what I call nation building.”

The Ravalli County Commission, however, has steadily opposed the CSKT’s request. Among the commissioners’ stated concerns is the loss of roughly $800 in property taxes that would result from the transfer. They also worry about the potential impacts of having a pocket of sovereign land set aside within their county, and why the tribes would want to work with the federal government rather than local. At the Nov. 20 meeting, they asked specifically if the tribes intended to erect a casino atop the parcel.

Later during the same meeting, Ravalli County Planning Board Chair Jan Wisniewski warned commissioners of the CSKT’s request, saying that American Indians have a history of using trust lands as a refuge to “get drunk and try and run back into the reservation so they don’t get caught,” according to meeting minutes.

“The county cannot go into that sovereign nation to apprehend the drunken Indians,” he said. “So the jails are full of Indians (sic) which cost us tax dollars. One jail in particular (Havre?) had a count of 58.”

In response to Wisniewski’s testimony and the behavior of the Ravalli County officials, Bitterrooter Pam Small posted an online petition demanding that the commission apologize for the county’s “cultural insensitivity and ignorance” that garnered nearly 500 signatures.

Such criticism helped persuade the commissioners on Nov. 27 to issue an apology to the tribes. Roughly 20 Bitterroot residents attended the meeting, with many of them verbally lashing out at the commissioners, characterizing the county’s overall treatment of the CSKT as “paternalistic” and akin to “an inquisition.”

“The whole tone of this meeting was confrontational,” former Ravalli County attorney George Corn said. “They were grilled by your attorneys … At best it was denigrating. At worst, it implied racism.”

In response to the onslaught, county commissioners say that the Nov. 20 discussion was taken out of context—that they were only attempting to evaluate all possible outcomes that could result from the transfer. “It was in no way condescending or adversarial,” Commissioner Jeff Burrows said last week, before the commission voted to hand-deliver an apology to the tribes.

Wisniewski’s legal advisor, Robert C. Myers, echoes the commissioners when maintaining that his client’s statements were taken out of context. “We don’t know yet fully what was actually said,” he says. “People hear what they think they hear.”

For Incashola, the issue comes back to education and respect. For instance, he says the thought of the tribes placing a casino on Medicine Tree is preposterous and reflects a misunderstanding of the importance the CSKT place on preserving their culture.

“I think the county commissioners don’t understand,” Incashola says.

The whole back and forth leaves him weary.

“I get so tired of trying to defend my identity, to try to defend my values,” he says. “I feel that what happened in Hamilton is just plain ignorant.”

Incashola says his elders, who faced the worst kind of racism, taught him that there are more good people in the world than bad. He takes some comfort in that thought. In light of what transpired in Ravalli County, however, Incashola isn’t confident that racism will ever completely disappear.

GOP has slim, but possible, chance to win House seat

December 5, 2013

By Jerry Cornfield, Herald Writer

It’s been 33 years since voters chose a Republican governor in Washington.

But it’s been even longer since a member of the Grand Old Party got elected from the 38th Legislative District to the House of Representatives.

You have to go back half a century to find the last one — Jack Metcalf, a Whidbey Island Republican who won a House seat when the district’s boundaries encompassed parts of Snohomish and Island counties.

With any luck, Republicans could end their losing streak next year in a district now centered in Everett and includes Tulalip and a sliver of Marysville.

A vacancy in the state House is creating the potential opportunity. Democrat John McCoy of Tulalip moved from the House to the Senate last month and seven people want his old seat.

June Robinson, Jennifer Smolen, Deborah Parker, Ed Triezenberg, Kelly Wright, David Simpson and Ray Miller are hustling up support from Democratic precinct committee officers who will vote out their top three choices Tuesday. Sometime in the following week, the Snohomish County Council will appoint one of them.

All seven are respectable members of the community with solid Democratic credentials and similar philosophical approaches to governing.

None of them are political rock stars and most are not widely known among voters. Whoever is appointed will need to squeeze out every ounce of advantage from their incumbent status to retain the job in next fall’s election.

As a newcomer, they’ll be politically vulnerable. Any vote they take, bill they introduce, utterance they make could find its way into the campaign. As a latecomer, they will be unable to fund raise during the 2014 session, while any Republican challenger can.

Those are small factors in Republicans’ favor. And they may not be the only ones.

Voters in the district may be less enamored with embracing all Democrats for office after seeing two of them, County Executive Aaron Reardon and state Sen. Nick Harper, resign in disgrace this year.

And if Republicans field a candidate with a strong resume and ample campaign billfold — something they’ve not done in recent years — victory isn’t beyond grasp.

Much of it will depend on what happens in Everett, where the largest chunk of the district’s voters resides.

While Everett voters only seem to send Democrats to do their bidding in Olympia, they are not afraid of electing Republicans to the nonpartisan City Council.

Scott Bader proved it last November when he defeated June Robinson for a council seat by roughly 1,800 votes. Though there was no “R” next to Bader’s name or “D” next to Robinson’s; one didn’t have to work very hard to find out what political party each associated with.

It was an impressive performance in a presidential election year. Democrats turned out more voters than Republicans and outspent them to make sure everyone knew the names of all the Democrats on the ballot.

Still, in numerous Everett precincts, Bader received as many votes as McCoy did in his legislative race.

Campaign strategists view such ballot behavior as an opportunity to snare votes from the less partisan members of their opponent’s party.

Republican Party leaders may see this as one more selling point to those they’re recruiting to do battle for the seat in 2014.They’ll need a few as they know history is not on their side.

Political reporter Jerry Cornfield’s blog, The Petri Dish, is at www.heraldnet.com. Contact him at 360-352-8623 or jcornfield@heraldnet.com.

South Africa begins life without Nelson Mandela

JOHANNESBURG — What next for South Africa?

By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA

Associated Press December 6, 2013

This racially charged country that, on Nelson Mandela’s watch, inspired the world by embracing reconciliation in all-race elections in 1994 is again in the global spotlight after the loss of such a towering historical figure. It is a time not just for grief and gratitude, but also a clear-eyed assessment of national strengths and shortcomings in a future without a man who was a guide and comfort to so many.

“It’s a new beginning,” said Kyle Redford, one of many outside the home of the anti-apartheid leader who became the nation’s first black president. “The loss of a legend is going to force us to come together once again.”

He acknowledged that there is a “sense of what next: Where do we go? What do we do? And how do we do it?”

Mandela’s resolve rubbed off on many of his compatriots, though such conviction is tempered by the reality that his vision of a “rainbow nation” failed, almost inevitably, to meet the heady expectations propelling the country two decades ago. Peaceful elections and relatively harmonious race relations define today’s South Africa; so do crime, corruption and economic inequality.

Mandela remained a powerful symbol in the hopeful, uncharted period after apartheid, even when he left the presidency, retired from public life and shuttled in and out of hospitals as a protracted illness eroded his once-robust frame. He became a moral anchor, so entwined with the national identity that some jittery South Africans wondered whether the country would slide into chaos after his death.

“Does it spell doomsday and disaster for us?” retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu asked rhetorically Friday before declaring that no, the country will not disintegrate.

“The sun will rise tomorrow and the next day and the next,” said Tutu, who like Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize for fighting apartheid and promoting reconciliation. “It may not appear as bright as yesterday, but life will carry on.”

A series of violent events since last year intensified worries over the state of the nation. The August 2012 shooting deaths of 34 striking miners by police at the Marikana platinum mine recalled, for some South Africans, state killings under apartheid. In February, a Mozambican taxi driver was dragged from a South African police vehicle and later died in a jail cell.

At the same time, tourism surged. Despite labor strife and credit-rating downgrades, resource-rich South Africa hosted Brazil, Russia, India and China at the “BRICS” summit in March. It has the biggest economy in Africa and aspires to continental leadership.

Mandela’s death will not destabilize race relations in the country, contrary to some fears, according to the South African Institute of Race Relations.

“For many years now, South Africans have got along with one another largely peacefully without Mr. Mandela having been active in the political sphere,” Lerato Moloi, the institute’s head of research, said. “In fact, Mr. Mandela’s passing may be cause for many to reflect on the remarkably peaceful and swift racial integration of many parts of society, including schools, suburbs, universities, and workplaces.”

Moloi said in a statement: “Although some of this had started to occur before 1994, as a symbol of racial reconciliation and forgiveness Mr. Mandela will be viewed by many as having played a pivotal role in creating such a society.”

Mandela’s life epitomized the fight for freedom and equality, said Human Rights Watch. It pointed out that South Africa’s education and health sectors are inadequate and the country remains divided by racial separation and deep economic inequality.

“Almost two decades into its democracy, South Africa is not the country that Mandela had said he hoped it would become,” the group said.

President Jacob Zuma evoked the idea of the 95-year-old Mandela as a beacon for the ages when he announced his death on Thursday night.

South Africans, Zuma said, must be determined “to live as Madiba has lived, to strive as Madiba has strived and to not rest until we have realized his vision of a truly united South Africa, a peaceful and prosperous Africa, and a better world.”

Mandela, also known by his clan name Madiba, admitted to weakness and failings, yet rose to greatness in a way that no contemporary or successor could match.

Zuma, for example, has credentials as an anti-apartheid activist who was imprisoned with Mandela. But he and the ruling African National Congress, once led by Mandela, have been dogged by corruption allegations that have eroded support for the government. In the days before Mandela’s death, South African media were filled with reports on the alleged lavish use of state funds for construction at Zuma’s family compound.

The scene outside Mandela’s house embodied the mixed picture in South Africa, where political sparring between the ruling party and the opposition has sharpened ahead of national elections next year, the 20th anniversary of the pivotal vote in which Mandela became president.

Mourners outside the home mingled in an inclusive, celebratory atmosphere that prompted the Rev. Inigo Alvarez, a Catholic priest, to declare: “Now we experience what is South Africa, all kinds of people, all kinds of regions.”

Yet ANC activists in yellow jumpsuits pasted posters on the perimeter walls of the Mandela compound and handed out leaflets presenting the party as the heir to his tradition. In death, Mandela was still drawn into politics.

Bits ‘n’ Pieces: Nonprofit supports Native arts

December 6, 2013 By Scott Hewitt

The Columbian social issues & neighborhoods reporter

T. Lulani Arquette believes that the original, nature-based values of Native American peoples still have a lot to teach a Western culture that she said is teetering on the edge of suicide.

She’s wary of “noble savage” stereotypes, she said, but when she looks around at the degradation of our planet, she can’t help but conclude that our drive to conquer and use nature is misguided at best. “There is a more sacred view of the circle of life,” she said. For all their diversity, the original nations of North America did share that essential view.

Arquette is president and CEO of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, a nonprofit agency founded in 2007 as a sort of “Native National Endowment for the Arts,” she said. Originally seeded with Ford Foundation money, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation meant to make its home in Portland, Arquette said, but somebody advised her to check out Vancouver. The Historic Reserve area was so full of relevant history that the foundation seemed a perfect fit there, she said, and set up shop on Officers Row until a combination of rising rent and organizational growth spurred it to move to a bigger, more practical space on Northeast 112th Avenue.

Native Arts and Cultures Foundation “traditional arts” fellow Israel Shotridge and one of his creations.

The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation aims to take on difficult problems — environmental, economic, cultural — through great artworks created by Native Americans. Since 2010, the foundation has supported 85 artists nationwide with $1.6 million in grants. Poetry and painting, film and dance, traditional and edgily post-modern — all sorts of artworks by all sorts of American Indian, Alaskan and Hawaiian artists have been produced thanks to the support of the Vancouver-based foundation.

The foundation just announced its fellowships for 2014: a total of $220,000 for 16 artists, including Israel Shotridge, a totem pole restoration artist and Tlingit Indian based in Vashon, to Brooke Swaney, a Blackfeet/Salish filmmaker from Poison, Mont.

Perhaps because there are so few Native Americans in Clark County (less than 1 percent of the population), the foundation has found precious few local artists to support. It is an ongoing supporter of downtown Vancouver’s Ke Kukui Foundation (kekukuifoundation.org), which presents an annual Hawaiian Festival in Esther Short Park the third weekend of every July. It helped Ke Kukui bring an independent Hawaiian film event to the Kiggins Theatre in November. And it has sponsored summer workshops for young people.

Arquette — a native Hawaiian with degrees in both political science and theater — said she’d love to connect more with Clark County Native American artists and cultural institutions. The foundation’s fellowships aren’t for beginners, however — they’re for developed artists who have produced a “substantial body of work” and are at the top of their game, Arquette said.

Learn more about the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation at nativeartsandcultures.org.

Bits ‘n’ Pieces appears Fridays and Saturdays. If you have a story you’d like to share, email bits@columbian.com.

Snow flurries across Puget Sound into weekend

While it's certainly cold enough to snow, forecasters say the only real chance of snow may show up in a flurry. (AP) — While it’s certainly cold enough to snow, forecasters say the only real chance of snow may show up in a flurry. (AP)

BY Stephanie Klein on December 5, 2013

MyNorthwest.com

While it’s certainly cold enough to snow, forecasters say the only real chance may show up in a flurry.

KING-5 Meteorologist Rich Marriott says no significant accumulations are expected. As the system moves south over the Olympic Peninsula and down to Northern California, another surge of cold air will move in from Canada.

Temperatures are expected to dip even lower as the new system moves in, which will bring with it gusty winds for the Northern counties and foothills. Gusts could reach 45 miles per hour Friday morning.

The cold snap isn’t expected to end until Monday when a system from the south rolls in. In the meanwhile, the lowest temps of the week are expected on Saturday morning when forecasters say the mercury may reach the teens and single digits across inland locations. We could even break a record low at Sea-Tac.

As the temperatures warm up and precipitation moves in, forecasters say we may see snow or freezing rain in some locations.

Beyond Tuesday, Marriott says we should be back to normal Western Washington weather with rain in the lowlands and snow in mountains.

Panel blasts ‘colonial model’ of justice in rural Alaska, backs Indian Country model

A boy rides a four-wheeler through the rural Alaska community of Savoonga on Saint Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. Loren Holmes photo

By Alex DeMarban

Alaska Dispatch December 4, 2013

Members of a Congressionally-created panel that blasted the state’s justice system for Alaska Native villages arrived in Anchorage on Wednesday, where they took on a top state official and publicly pushed for reform to give Alaska tribes more local authority over criminal matters.

“It’s clear to us Alaska remains on the wrong track,” said Troy Eid, chairman of the Indian Law and Order Commission (ILOC), which issued its scathing report last month. “The problems tribes face in the Lower 48 are magnified in Alaska, which still relies on a colonial model (of justice) that results in more violent crime.”

The report, “A Roadmap for Making Native America Safer,” called for expanded tribal authority to address violence and crime in Indian Country and Alaska Native villages.

Recommending Indian Country in Alaska

Alaska Attorney General Michael Geraghty on Tuesday fired off a letter to Eid, taking issue with aspects of the report and acknowledging some of the problems in the state’s justice system. He said Alaska must work with tribes to improve public safety, and highlighted steps taken under Gov. Sean Parnell to make villages safer.

Ultimately, Geraghty opposed the report’s recommendation that Indian Country be created in Alaska as it is in the Lower 48, where tribes own land. That status means Lower 48 tribes enjoy rights not afforded Alaska Native tribes.

” … The state believes the commission was wide of the mark in recommending a return to Indian country as a means for solving the admittedly serious public safety issues facing our Native peoples,” reads the letter.

More than 200 Alaska Native villages suffer some of the nation’s highest rates of domestic violence, sexual assault, suicide and other problems.

Meanwhile, scores of villages lack police and quick access to courts and other basic services. Often, victims must wait for Alaska State Troopers based in other communities to fly in before crimes can be investigated, a process that can take days in stormy weather.

“We are fighting for our lives here. We have the highest rates of almost all deplorable conditions known to mankind,” said Mary Ann Mills, tribal council chairperson for the Kenaitze Indian Tribe, in a question-and-answer session following presentations by Eid and the other ILOC commissioners at the Dena’ina Convention Center in Anchorage Wednesday morning. Mills was just one of several tribal representatives from around the state who came to listen to the commission’s findings, and who overwhelmingly expressed support for tribal sovereignty.

“The current system is broken,” said Eid. “You have 75 communities with no policing at all. And then you have 100 VPSOs (village public safety officers) who don’t carry firearms and can’t provide the full range of services that a state sworn officer can provide.”

The nine-person commission sunsets in January. Commissioners came to Alaska last year to conduct interviews for the report. Eid and two others returned this week to speak at the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ rural providers conference in Anchorage. Eid also planned to meet with Geraghty on Wednesday afternoon.

‘Not just an Alaska problem’

“This is not just an Alaska problem. But I know injustice when I see it,” Eid said at the conference.

“We’re not a bunch of radicals. We are not bomb throwers. We just think that self government should be the rule in Alaska,” he said, noting that he’s a lifelong Republican and was appointed by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. His point? The commissioners come from varied political backgrounds, yet they unanimously came to the same conclusion about the abysmal safety conditions in rural Alaska.

At the conference, commissioners and Alaskans renewed their calls for the creation of Indian Country in Alaska. The courts decided long ago that unlike the Lower 48, virtually no tribal lands existed in Alaska.

The distinction has limited the federal benefits that flow to Alaska tribes. A stark example of that disparity came earlier this year with the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act that granted new criminal jurisdiction to Lower 48 tribes, including the ability to issue civil protective orders to arrest and detain any person. Alaska tribes did not receive such powers.

On Tuesday, Geraghty had his letter delivered to Eid’s room at the Captain Cook Hotel, so Eid could understand the state’s views before the two met. Hotel staff placed the letter on Eid’s pillow for him to read when he arrived, “without the mint,” Eid joked.

Geraghty said the commission’s urgent challenge resonates with him. “The state of Alaska can, and should, be doing more to work collaboratively with local tribes to improve public safety,” he said.

He noted the Department of Law has drafted a plan that would allow tribes to address certain domestic violence, alcohol-related or misdemeanor offenses. The accused could choose civil remedies in tribal court instead of facing state criminal charges.

The state has also adopted a template memorandum of understanding for villages that have banned alcohol. A local council would issue “restorative justice remedies in lieu of citation for alcohol possession,” said Geraghty. He conceded that illegal possession “is an offense which is rarely prosecuted in small rural communities.”

Alaska’s rural police force doubled in size

Geraghty also noted that the state’s rural force of public safety officers has roughly doubled in recent years, to more than 100. Draft regulations to allow public safety officers to carry firearms is in a public-comment period. Arming officers was something another ILOC commissioner, Ted Quasala, said was as basic as it gets.

“There is no other law enforcement agency anywhere, outside of here, where you have unarmed officers who respond to very violent and volatile situations. There is no way you are going to send an unarmed officer to those situations alone, by themselves (in the rest of America),” said Quasala, who has law enforcement experience. He has previously worked as a tribal police chief and as director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Office of Law Enforcement Services.

In his letter, Geraghty also noted that Parnell has started annual marches to raise awareness about domestic violence and sexual assault in 160 communities.

“The fact is we will not solve this problem solely through arrest and prosecution — though that is obviously an important component. Instead we must also raise awareness and educate our kids,” the letter said.

But Geraghty’s letter also took issue with aspects of the report. The report had blasted the state’s support for the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, despite the disparity it upheld for Alaska tribes. The report called the state’s support “unconscionable.”

Geraghty called that language “inappropriate. We have admittedly a long way to go to solve this problem but I think the commission does a disservice to the state when it paints with such a broad brush,” he said.

Eid said he was encouraged to see Geraghty express support for the report’s findings, but he added that establishing Indian Country in Alaska isn’t the only solution.

In fact, the report spells out numerous ways to improve rural justice, he said, including that the president, through executive order, allow the Bureau of Indian Affairs to provide funding for tribal police in Alaska, a benefit enjoyed by Lower 48 tribes, but not those in Alaska.

Tribes don’t actually have to own land to have more authority, Eid noted. One thing the state can do now is define boundaries where tribes can have increased criminal jurisdiction, even though they don’t own the land.

“We all agree the situation in Alaska is a problem, and that Alaska is out of step with the U.S.,” Eid said. “The way to address the problem is more local control and local decision making.”

Contact Alex DeMarban at alex(at)alaskadispatch.com. Reporter Jill Burke contributed to this story.