When the story appeared about Tony Picard, the 400-lb running back and nose tackle for White Swan High School, it was an immediate sensation. Picard appeared in local and national news interviews, including CNN and ABC’s Good Morning America. A YouTube video of a collection of plays his plays gained more than 3 million views. ICTMN caught up with Picard for a Q&A to further introduce him to Indian Country.
What has happened to you since the story came out?
I’ve been getting multiple phone calls. I went on national news. It’s been pretty crazy. I’ve still got more to do.
What has your reaction been to all the attention?
At first it was just crazy. All the attention is nice, but after so much, it kind of gets to you. I’m liking it, but I’m not getting all big-headed about it.
Have you heard from other college coaches since the story came out?
Yeah. I’ve heard from quite a few actually. [I’m] heading up to Washington State University for a recruiting trip.
How are your teammates taking it?
They’re just supporting me.
What is your hope for the future, five or ten years down the road?
I’d be finishing my last year of playing college football. I wouldn’t mind playing in the pros, and I think it would be an honor to play in the NFL. Other than that, if I don’t go to the NFL, I’d go to school for forestry or be a wildlife conservation officer.
What do you think about when you shake the other team’s captain’s hands?
Honestly there’s nothing going through my mind. I just shake their hand to show some sportsmanship. I don’t want to beat them up, but just win the game.
Do your teammates have a nickname for you?
Everybody calls me “Big Tone.”
Away from football, do you have hobbies?
Yes I do. I like to go hunting. I like to fish. I like to be out with family and friends.
What animals have you taken?
I’ve shot deer, elk, moose, buffalo, and bear. Also, coyotes and turkeys.
Do you have a girlfriend?
Yes.
Do you feel you’re pretty much a typical high school senior?
Yeah. A lot of people see me as famous right now, but I am just a normal high school student.
Only 6,000 people speak the Lakota language, few of them under 65, but people are working to keep it alive
In Our Lady of Lourdes Elementary School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, teacher Gloria Two Crow conducts a Lakota language session.Kayla Gahagan
PINE RIDGE INDIAN RESERVATION, S.D. — Dodge tumbleweeds and stray dogs. Venture down a deeply rutted dirt road. Walk into the warmth of a home heated by a wood-burning stove. There’ll be a deer roast marinating on the kitchen counter.
It is here, in a snug home that sits on the edge of nearly 3 million acres of South Dakota prairie, that you’ll find the heart of a culture. It’s here, at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where Joe and Randi Boucher make dinner for their two young daughters. The smaller one squirms and is gently admonished: “Ayustan,” she is told — leave it alone.
It’s here where the Lakota language is spoken, taught and absorbed in day-to-day life.
That makes the Boucher home a rare find. According to the UCLA Language Materials Project, only 6,000 fluent speakers of the Lakota language remain in the world, and few of those are under the age of 65. Of the nearly 30,000 people who live on Pine Ridge, between 5 and 10 percent speak Lakota.
For the past four decades, the race to save the language has started and stuttered, taken on by well-meaning individuals and organizations whose efforts were often snuffed out by lack of funding, community support or organizational issues.
Some days, saving the language “seems like an insurmountable challenge,” said Bob Brave Heart, executive vice president of Red Cloud Indian School on the reservation.
The reason, some say, is a number of serious socioeconomic issues that overwhelm the Pine Ridge communities and make it difficult to successfully revive the dying language. The reservation has an 80 percent unemployment rate, and half the residents live below the federal poverty line, making it the second poorest county in the United States. Next to Haiti, it has the lowest life expectancy in the Western Hemisphere. Men live an average of 48 years; women, 52.
But those aren’t hurdles to learning the language, Randi Boucher said. Instead, they should stand as the very reason to perpetuate it.
“It is our language and our life way that will make change,” she said. “We have a loss of self-identity. We’re trying to exist without that. The language, that’s where the healing starts.”
‘Time to do it right’
Language signs at Red Cloud Indian School, which plans to publish the first comprehensive Lakota language K-12 curriculum by the end of this year. Kayla Gahagan
Brave Heart agreed.
“If you lose the language, you lose the culture,” he said. “When students are informed and part of their culture and their language, they have a better sense of self-worth.”
From Joe Boucher’s point of view, they face a much more serious hurdle.
“The biggest enemy we’re battling is apathy,” he said. “Our young people don’t care. They’d rather live in the now.”
They aren’t the only generation resisting the past. Cultural assimilation practices in the U.S. in the 19th century — sometimes in the form of verbal and physical punishment — forced many natives to speak English.
Elders here relive stories of having their mouths washed with soap or their tongues snapped with rubber bands by boarding school staff for speaking their native language.
“We were persecuted; it was dehumanizing,” said high school language teacher Philomine Lakota. “I was completely brainwashed into thinking English was the only way.”
And yet, Brave Heart said, now is the time to move forward.
“We’ve been teaching the language for 40 years, and we’ve been very ineffective,” he said. “It’s time to do it right.”
The school, alongside the American Indian Studies Research Institute at Indiana University, is about to publish the first comprehensive K-12 Lakota language curriculum. The private Catholic school embarked on the project six years ago, developing, testing and revising the curriculum, with the goal to publish by the end of this year.
Starting next year, students will be required to take Lakota language classes through elementary, middle and the first three years of high school. The final year is optional.
“This year’s first graders will be the first group to go through the entire curriculum,” said Melissa Strickland, who serves as the Lakota language project assistant at Red Cloud. She works with the six Lakota language teachers and trains staff across campus to use the language when conversing with the 575-member student body.
An immersion school
The Boucher family lives on the edge of the nearly 3 million acres that make up the reservation. Here, a shelter, constructed with a view of the scenic Badlands, that is used by Native American artists during the summer to create and sell their artwork. Kayla Gahagan
And is it working?
Last year, language test scores at Red Cloud jumped by 84 percent, and this year more than 70 percent of students reported using Lakota at home, in school and in their communities.
Teacher Philomine Lakota is encouraged, but is also aware that many students do not have family members speaking the language at home, and that many will leave the reservation and enter a world where it is not used.
“I realize I will not turn them into fluent speakers,” she said, but her desire is that they become proficient and eventually teach others. “There is hope.”
The $2.2 million project has not been without its hiccups, including personnel changes and disagreements among staff over which materials to use.
“Many programs for language revitalization are immersion,” Brave Heart said. “We’re not. We’re trying to do it within the confines of the educational system.”
Others have taken a road less traveled.
Peter Hill taught Lakota at Red Cloud before embarking on what he calls an exhausting journey to create the reservation’s first successful Lakota language immersion program, one that promises to fill two major gaps for families — language learning and quality, affordable child care.
“Child care out here is horrible. There’s no day care,” he said. “People just kind of get by with family members.”
After months of often unfruitful fundraising and research, the Lakota Language Immersion School opened a year ago with five babies and toddlers, including one of Hill’s daughters.
“At some point, you feel like it’s now or never,” Hill said. “There’s never going to be enough money or the ideal situation.”
The word has since spread, he said, and things are looking up. Today the program has 10 kids and three full-time staff members.
“We literally have kids on a wait list a couple years into the future, for kids not even born yet,” Hill said.
‘Love’ in two languages
The program was almost derailed last month when a severe South Dakota blizzard forced it out of its building. It was given another building in Oglala and recently moved in, but Hill knows the clock is ticking.
“The oldest kids are between 2 and 3 and starting to talk,” he said. “Eventually our feet will get held to the fire. If we say we’re an immersion program, we need to produce fluent kids.”
Finding qualified staff and enforcing 100 percent spoken Lakota remains the biggest hurdle.
“Even fluent speakers aren’t used to avoiding English,” he said. “People aren’t used to speaking Lakota to children. If they were, the language would be in much better shape. It’s a steep learning curve.”
If the language is to survive, the greater movement to save it will have to center on two things, Hill said — kids learning it as a first language and people like himself learning and teaching it as a second language.
Randi and Joe Boucher, who both studied the language in college and learned it from relatives, say they are encouraged by the new efforts.
They speak in Lakota half the time, gently pushing their kids to learn more than names of household objects. They want conversation:
Le aŋpetu kiŋ owayawa ekta takuku uŋspenič’ičhiya he? (Has the dog been fed?)
Wana wakȟaŋyeža kiŋ iyuŋgwičhuŋkhiyiŋ kta iyečheča. (We should put the kids to bed.)
And: thečhiȟila (I love you), a sentiment now mastered by both girls.
Randi is pursuing a master’s degree in language revitalization and hopes to someday open a school focused on a holistic approach to culture and language.
She is expecting another child next summer, and said that even with her aspirations to start a school, the heart of language learning should be in the home.
In their home, their daughters’ traditional native cradleboards — built, sewn and beaded by family — are out on display, a visible reminder of the couple’s insistence on raising their children with ties to their native blood.
“The day we have grandchildren and they can speak to us in Lakota, then we’ll know we did it right,” Randi said. “Then we can die happy.”
Days before the government shutdown ended in October, Cheryl Crazy Bull calmly recounted some of the steps already taken by tribal colleges to cope with funding cuts.
“Over the years, they’ve never had enough [resources],” says Crazy Bull, who became president of the American Indian College Fund last year. “They operate with frugality and worst-case-scenario behavior.”
Cheryl Crazy Bull was president of Northwest Indian College near Bellingham, Wash., for nearly 10 years before joining the American Indian College Fund.
Crazy Bull knows this firsthand. She was president of Northwest Indian College near Bellingham, Wash., for nearly 10 years before joining the college fund.
“I remember as college president literally looking at cash flow every day to see what bills we could pay,” she recalls.
Crazy Bull, 58, who takes to heart her Lakota name, which means “They depend on her,” brings to her latest job persistence, business know-how, passion for the tribal college’s mission, and a willingness to take on unfamiliar challenges.
Growing up on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota, Crazy Bull was one of five children. Her parents ran a grocery store until her father joined the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Her parents, whom she describes as “well-educated public servants,” stressed education. But it took Crazy Bull a couple of tries to get on the right track.
She first enrolled at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. — and left after one quarter. Academics weren’t a problem, but she had a sheltered life and the social scene was a “huge shock,” Crazy Bull says.
She transferred twice — to Northern State University in Aberdeen, S.D., then finally settling in at the University of South Dakota, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in business management. She later earned a master’s degree in education administration from South Dakota State University.
After graduating, Crazy Bull taught business and Native studies and held administrative positions at Sinte Gleska University, the tribal college that serves Rosebud. After 15 years at the school, she left to oversee an agency that assisted local home-based businesses, including auto mechanics, quilting and food catering.
At this point, Crazy Bull was the single parent of three children and did some consulting on the side to help support her family.
Crazy Bull then became the equivalent of a superintendent at St. Francis Indian School, which enrolled Rosebud children in kindergarten through 12th grade.
After nearly five years at the school, Crazy Bull moved to the northwest to be near her daughter and take a post that she had always wanted — president of a tribal college.
While at Northwest Indian College, she resolved issues with financing and accreditation before taking the school from a two-year to a four-year institution, something she said the community wanted badly. The college had to identify and recruit students who wanted to get their bachelor’s degrees, ensure the facility had the requisite advanced degrees, and build its curriculum and facilities. Much of the campus was rebuilt.
Crazy Bull was new to many of the tasks.
“I find myself in situations where I don’t know anything, but something needs to be done,” she says.
Sharon Kinley, director of the college’s Coast Salish Institute, which Crazy Bull established, says she brought a good mix to the school. “[Crazy Bull] is a visionary, but not just that, she has the practical, deliberate background with which visions become real,” says Kinley.
After almost 10 years at Northwest, Crazy Bull felt she should move on. She was appointed president of the American Indian College Fund, based in Denver, after her predecessor retired.
Crazy Bull’s accomplishments at Northwest helped her get the job, says Dr. Elmer Guy, chairman of the College Fund’s board of trustees.
But Crazy Bull has more mountains to climb in heading an organization that gives financial support to the nation’s 37 tribal colleges and to students who come from more than 250 tribes around the country.
The college fund is pushing for legislation to fully fund the schools, which are authorized to receive $8,000 per student per year but get more like $5,500.
Next year, to mark its 25th anniversary, the college fund will mount a $25 million fundraising campaign that Crazy Bull wants to follow with a bigger campaign for scholarships and endowments.
When she is not working on behalf of the college fund, Crazy Bull makes quilts as gifts and for traditional ceremonies. She also writes poems, stories and essays and is currently writing her memoirs.
In the late 1800s, when dams were first built around the Northwest, salmon and steelhead stocks began to decline. Fish hatcheries were put forth as a solution. Wild fish were taken from Northwest rivers and spawned in captivity, ensuring future generations of fish could be released back into the wild every season.
Jim Lichatowich is a biologist who’s worked on salmon issues as a researcher, manager and scientific advisor for more than 40 years. He sat down with EarthFix’s Ashley Ahearn to talk about his new book: “Salmon, People and Place: A Biologist’s Search For Salmon Recovery.”
Ashley Ahearn: For someone who doesn’t know what a hatchery is or doesn’t understand how it operates, what happens at a hatchery?
Jim Lichatowich: Fundamentally at a hatchery, salmon are taken out of the river, put into ponds until they’re ready to spawn and then the eggs are taken. They’re fertilized. Various different procedures are used at different hatcheries but that’s basically it. The eggs hatch, the juveniles are reared in the hatchery for varying levels of time and then they’re released back to the river and expected to migrate downstream fairly rapidly and go out to the ocean and from that point on pick up the normal life history of a regular wild salmon.
I guess the idea of how hatcheries started and [what] sustained them was, habitat was degrading and the fish weren’t doing as well in the degraded habitat. So the hatchery became a solution, a way of circumventing the problems we were creating ourselves by building dams, pumping out irrigation water, poor forestry practices that put silt and sawdust into the streams. The hatchery was supposed to take the salmon away from that problem, circumvent the problem.
Ashley Ahearn: Jim you talk about the ‘machine metaphor’ for nature. What is that? Can you read a section from your book here?
Jim Lichatowich: Sure I’ll read where I talk about the machine metaphor and the fish factory. And I might add here that I use ‘fish factory’ instead of hatchery through a large part of the book because that’s what hatcheries were originally called when they were first being used. They were called ‘pisce factories,’ or fish factories.
“The fish factory and the machine metaphor are a perfect match. The mechanistic worldview reduced salmon-sustaining ecosystems to an industrial process and rivers to simple conduits whose only function was to carry artificially-propagated salmon to the sea. The mechanistic worldview still has a powerful grip on salmon management and restoration programs in spite of a growing scientific understanding that the picture of ecosystems created by the machine metaphor was seriously flawed.”
And really, it’s been the factory metaphor that has guided a lot of the operation of hatcheries.
Ashley Ahearn: One of the things I really liked about your book is these side channel chapters that you sprinkle in between some pretty heavy critique of the way we manage our fisheries in this region. One of your side channels that I particularly liked was when you write about a trip to Indiana to the St. Joe River. Tell me about that side channel.
Jim Lichatowich: Well I grew up outside of South Bend, Indiana and the St. Joe River flows through South Bend. When I grew up there the St. Joe was pretty much a sewer that didn’t have much in the way of fish life. And over the years, particularly since I left — I left there in the 60s — there’d been a lot of clean up. And with the introduction of salmon into Lake Michigan — the St. Joe flows into Lake Michigan — they built a salmon hatchery and had a Chinook salmon run up the St. Joe River. They had to build a hatchery and clean the river up, too.
I was there and I was walking along the river and I came to where a tributary came into the St. Joe, and there was a salmon carcass — a Chinook salmon carcass laying up on the bank of the stream — and it just struck me how out of place it was. Seeing carcasses along rivers is pretty common here, but in Indiana that was a sight. And later on in watching the river, I saw salmon trying to spawn and I knew that their spawning was not going to be successful because the gravel was so silted in that the eggs weren’t going to get oxygen. I talked to a biologist a couple of days later and they confirmed that there’s very little or no actual reproduction, even though there are fish out there spawning.
I thought, you know, this really robs the salmon of their whole heroic story of battling up stream to get to the place where they spawned and where they could complete the cycle of parent to offspring. Even though it’s looked on by sportsmen in Northern Indiana as a positive thing, and there were a lot of people fishing for these fish that were in the river, I somehow had this nagging feeling that ‘should we be doing this to other species? Should we take them from where they belong and put them in a place where they have no chance of surviving without our intervention in a hatchery and call it salmon management?’
Ashley Ahearn: Is that what is happening here in the Northwest? I mean, we have salmon. The salmon have lived here for thousands of years — it’s not like Indiana, but arguably it’s a similar closed … are we robbing the salmon of their story here in the Northwest?
Jim Lichatowich: Well when we rely on hatcheries instead of healthy rivers, then we are robbing them of part of their story. Fortunately most of the rivers in the Northwest can support some wild production, some more than others.
But by relying more and more on hatcheries we’re creating a charade of sorts where the river that can’t support a salmon becomes a stage prop where fishermen and fish play out their respective roles, reenacting something, an important part of our past, that now is sort of a hollow empty memory of it.
Ashley Ahearn: Jim from your perspective are all hatcheries bad? Is there a good hatchery?
Jim Lichatowich: I think there might be, but the answer to that question hasn’t been answered. There has been attempts to reform hatcheries in the past and they haven’t been successfully implemented. There is a lot of good science now that should help managers change the way hatcheries are being operated to begin to see if they can begin to be integrated into a natural production system in a watershed. But it remains to be seen whether that will actually happen.
Ashley Ahearn: So if you were in charge, what needs to happen? What would be your order of operations to get salmon recovery back on track in this region?
Jim Lichatowich: Well I have two kind of strong ideas and those strong ideas were what I followed in writing this book. One was from John Livingston who said that all environmental problems, and I take that to mean salmon problems, are like icebergs, because, like an iceberg, environmental problems have a visible tip and for the salmon that tip is dams, over harvest, poor hatchery practice, poor logging practice –- the litany of things that we’re all aware of. But he says in addition there’s this huge hidden mass that an iceberg has. In that mass he calls it, he says in that mass there are the myths, beliefs and assumptions about how nature works that drive the decisions that either create the issues or prevent them from being corrected. And I think that’s a pretty powerful idea. We need to examine that body of myths, assumptions and beliefs. What I call in my book, our salmon story, and improve upon it. Make sure it reflects the latest science and not some really outdated myths or beliefs.
Ashley Ahearn: Or machine metaphors.
Jim Lichatowich: Or machine metaphors, right. And the other is Gary Nabhan’s idea. In one of his books he says that animals don’t go extinct because someone shoots the last one, or a bulldozer scrapes the last habitat. They go extinct because the web of relationships that sustain them unravels. He then put it in anthropomorphic terms and said, they go extinct because of a lack of ecological companionship. I think that idea is intuitive but at the same time very powerful. It should lead us to instead of defining the salmon’s problem in terms of numbers, which is really limiting your definition to the symptoms, it would be defined in terms of the unraveling of those relationships. And recovery, instead of boosting numbers by releasing more hatchery fish, would be a mending of those relationships. Trying to re-institute those relationships, and that’s a different approach than what we’ve been doing.
Ashley Ahearn: It seems your solutions center around a fundamental philosophical shift that needs to happen in the way we view management.
Jim Lichatowich: That’s right, and that is a good summary of my purpose in this book, is to make an argument for that shift.
Jim Lichatowich is the author of “Salmon, People and Place: A Biologist’s Search For Salmon Recovery.”
By Steve Horn. November 26, 2013. Source: DeSmog Blog
Although TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sands pipeline has received the lion’s share of media attention, another key border-crossing pipeline benefitting tar sands producers was approved on November 19 by the U.S. State Department.
Like Keystone XL, the pipeline proposal requires U.S. State Department approval because it crosses the U.S.-Canada border. Unlike Keystone XL – which would carry diluted tar sands diluted bitumen (“dilbit”) south to the Gulf Coast – Kinder Morgan’s Cochin pipeline would carry the gas condensate (diluent) used to dilute the bitumen north to the tar sands.
“The decision allows Kinder Morgan Cochin LLC to proceed with a $260 million plan to reverse and expand an existing pipeline to carry an initial 95,000 barrels a day of condensate,” the Financial Post wrote.
“The extra-thick oil is typically cut with 30% condensate so it can move in pipelines. By 2035, producers could require 893,000 barrels a day of the ultra-light oil, with imports making up 786,000 barrels of the total.”
“Total US natural gasoline exports reached a record volume of 179,000 barrels per day in February as Canada’s thirst for oil sand diluent ramped up,” explained a May 2013 article appearing in Platts. ”US natural gasoline production is forecast to increase to roughly 450,000 b/d by 2020.”
Before Eagle Ford, Kinder Morgan Targeted Marcellus
Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale basin was Kinder Morgan’s first choice pick for sourcing tar sands diluent for export to Alberta. It wasn’t until that plan failed that the Eagle Ford Shale basin in Texas became Plan B.
“The company’s Cochin Marcellus Lateral Pipeline would have started in Marshall County, West Virginia, and transported natural gas liquids from the Marcellus producing region of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio,” wrote the Mount Vernon News of the canned project. [It] would [then] carry the [natural gas] liquids to processing plants and other petrochemical facilities in Illinois and Canada.”
“Kinder Magic”: More to Come?
Industry market trends publication RBN Energy described Kinder Morgan’s dominance of the tar sands diluent market as “Kinder Magic” in a January 2013 article.
“These are still early days for the developing condensate business in the Gulf Coast region,” RBN Energy’s Sandy Fielden wrote. “Plains All American and Kinder Morgan are developing the potential to deliver at least 170,000 barrels per day of Eagle Ford condensate as diluent to the Canadian tar sand fields in Alberta by the middle of 2014.”
Fielden explained we could see many more of these projects arise in the coming years.
“We have a sense that before too long there will be many more condensate infrastructure projects showing up like ‘magic’ in midstream company presentations.”
While the industry press coverage sounds optimistic, it doesn’t account for the concurrent rise of public opposition to dirty energy pipelines and expansion plans in the fracking and tar sands arenas, so only time will tell the fate of Cochin and its kin.
“We are not giving up despite these harsh weather conditions, sacrificing time with our families, our jobs, our homes, not only to protect land, water and people but to ensure a brighter future for the next 7 generations. We are asking for more support, through road blocks to be in solidarity. This is not just an Elsipogtog issue, this is a global issue and we need to raise awareness. Show us support any way possible, sending thank you’s, road blocks, banners, even dropping by, all and every type of support is appreciated.”
The 3rd encampment in Mi’kmaq Territory, at HWY 11, which saw stand off’s between the Mi’kmaq peoples protecting the water and RCMP protecting corporate interests, is requesting widespread global support.
The Provincial Court of New Brunswick has approved an injunction which names 5 people, including “Jane” and “John Doe”, to target the HWY 11 encampment. This encampment has successfully turned away SWN vehicles and is preventing SWN from conducting seismic testing on unceded Mi’kmaq lands. Each day that SWN cannot conduct its testing, it costs the company $54, 000. SWN is once again looking to the RCMP to enforce the injunction most recently granted. At this time, the RCMP have used the injunction to target the Mi’kmaq and have set up a “check point” on HWY 11, where the RCMP stop vehicles to arrest passengers and drivers at their whim.
We remember the last time the RCMP enforced an injunction against the Mi’kmaq people. As seen historically, the RCMP will continue to enforce the violation of treaties and attack Indigenous self-determination. At this time, the RCMP are not only harassing Mi’kmaq Land Defenders and non-Native supporters, but continuing to throw them in jail. On Thursday, November 28th the Mi’kmaq again turned SWN away – declaring another day of victory. They are standing up against brutal police repression, and continued theft of Indigenous lands and ongoing colonization. Show them they are not alone!
On Monday Dec. 2nd HWY 11 Land Defenders are asking you to show your solidarity by taking action in your community. Where possible, highway shutdowns are encouraged however any action of support, such as banner drops, are welcome. #ShutDownCanada
Residents of a rural northern Texas area were awoken early on Thanksgiving by not one but two earthquakes. Such quakes have become alarmingly normal during the past month, and fracking practices could be to blame.
North Texas has been feeling a string of earthquakes — more than a dozen — over the past few weeks. Most have been centered around Azle, with the most recent [previous] one being on Tuesday morning. All of those quakes have registered between 2.0 and 3.6 in magnitude. Those who live in the small town have grown concerned.
Azle leaders have called on state officials to have geologists investigate the cause of these quakes. “The citizens are concerned,” said Azle Assistant City Manager Lawrence Bryant at a city council meeting. “They should be.”
“If it’s a man-made cause, it would be nice to know,” Bryant added.
By “man-made,” Bryant means fracking-industry-made. Frackers pump their polluted wastewater deep into the ground, a practice well known as a cause of temblors. A wastewater injection well was shut down near Youngstown, Ohio, in late 2011 after it triggered more than 100 earthquakes of growing intensity in just a year.
University of Texas earthquake researcher Cliff Frolich says the recent Texas flurry could be the result of wastewater injection. From KHOU:
“I’d say it certainly looks very possible that the earthquakes are related to injection wells,” [Frolich] said in an interview from Austin.
Frolich notes, however, that thousands of such wells have operated in Texas for decades, with no quakes anywhere near them. He adds that there are probably a thousand unknown faults beneath Texas.
Azle mayor Alan Brundrett says it’s important to determine whether this latest series of quakes are man-made.
“What could it cause, down the road?” he asked. “What if a 5.0 happens and people’s houses start falling in on them?”
Brundrett has installed an earthquake alert app on his smartphone. It shows a dozen minor quakes near his town since November 5.
The growing problem of earthquakes in America is not just limited to Ohio and Texas. The following U.S. Geological Survey graph shows how the number of earthquakes with a magnitude of at least three has spiked as fracking has become widespread. “USGS scientists have found that at some locations the increase in seismicity coincides with the injection of wastewater in deep disposal wells,” the agency notes.
MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry weekend program on December 1 featured a panel that discussed “the foundational myths perpetuated about America and the realities of inequality,” according to MSNBC.com.
The two-hour program featured Ray Halbritter, Oneida Nation representative and CEO of Nation Enterprises, parent company of Indian Country Today Media Network, as one of the guest panelists.
Joining Halbritter as panelists were Chloe Angyal, editor at Feministing.com; Raul Reyes, NBC Latino contributor and New York Times columnist; and Jonathan Scott Holloway, professor of African American Studies, History and American Studies at Yale University and author of Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America since 1940.
Harris-Perry led the panelists through discussions on American traditions like Thanksgiving and how they relate to American values; along with the possible contradictions that exist between these traditions and our country’s public policies, as they relate to issues like hunger, immigration, and the economy.
Following the program’s introduction, Harris-Perry opened the discussion with the first question for Halbritter on how the country’s founding myths continue to impact the country today.
“The Thanksgiving mythology, to some extent, papers over the often painful and tragic history of American Indians and the way they’ve been treated,” Halbritter said. “Even though it was the shared celebration and tradition of Indian people to have this ceremonial of Thanksgiving and they gave to the first immigration group and shared with them in a way that allowed for their survival but it’s a celebration that should be of mutual inclusion and respect and often that’s not the case for American Indians in this country.”
Keeping on the Thanksgiving leftovers, Harris-Perry engaged Halbritter to elaborate on the Oneida Nation float making its appearance for the fifth year in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City. Where Halbritter mentioned that one of the reasons for the float is to show that American Indians are real people and not relics or mascots.
The discussion shifted from a topic usually synonymous with abundance of food like Thanksgiving to one that has become bare bones in the SNAP program cuts, followed by poverty levels throughout the country. Holloway mentioned how it’s currently easy for politicians to make scapegoats of those without power.
Harris-Perry elaborated on the scapegoat issue by mentioning an empathy deficit – a topic that President Barack Obama has talked about and wrote about. She discussed how the empathy deficit basically recognizes the country’s “ability to potentially have sympathy for people” while it still has an “inability to see one another across differences.”
Halbritter responded saying, “That’s some of the challenges for American Indians because they are often not viewed except as relics or mascots and as a result the real issues they suffer from the lowest standard of living, the highest mortality rates in the country, highest unemployment. And 7 of the 10 poorest counties in the United States are Indian reservations.
“So they really struggle to have their real issues dealt with in a way that’s real especially this time of the year. Especially because in some ways all this is connected, their self-image, their self-esteem and how they relate to themselves and the rest of society,” Halbritter said.
Never one to stray from saying what he really feels, Blackfeet tribal member Byron Farmer actually spent five days in a tribal jail in July for speaking out against his divided tribal government’s alleged corruption. Farmer, the de facto leader of the Blackfeet Against Corruption group, said he was arrested over free speech violations as not once did he threaten anyone in his BAC Facebook post stating about a proposed parade float: “We promise it will be exciting and make headlines worldwide. And we can tell you we are not planning anything violent or illegal so they (tribal council) will not be able to stop us.”
Although Farmer’s actions are protected under the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act, locally the Blackfeet Tribe deemed it a violation of the Blackfeet Ordinance 67 which protects council members against libelous “or misleading statements meant to harm, injure, discredit” them. Farmer’s attorney, David Gordon, writes, “They’re basically saying if you criticize the tribal council you’re going to go to jail and that’s frightening.”
Indian Country Today Media Network caught up with the always fiery Farmer to see what good jail did to him.
Was being arrested and jailed for five days over a free speech issue worth it?
I didn’t much like it. Our jails aren’t country clubs. I am a big guy so was never in danger, but I have to admit I was very angry. It was hardest on my family, but they understood the importance of BAC’s mission. But yeah, it did a firestorm of good. My five days in jail brought BAC millions of dollars in free national coast-to-cost advertising about what’s going on in our home. My arrest was the trigger that finally swung around the big national media spotlight to shine right on the Blackfeet Reservation, where it caught tribal leadership speechless, embarrassed, and scurrying. Ever since then the Blackfeet Tribal Council has been on the defensive and under non-stop media and legal pressure.
Where you surprised about the firestorm your arrest caused?
Americans may not understand the mysterious inner workings of Indian country, but they sure as hell understand what free speech is. So the national media immediately jumped on the news and printed my Facebook postings that triggered my imprisonment. Americans read my tame, innocuous comments and couldn’t believe that that sort of clearly Constitutionally-protected speech aimed at elected leaders could result in an arrest, let alone jail in America. People everywhere were really bewildered and angry and that fueled more media coverage. But I would have gladly done five months if that’s what it took to wake up the world to what is going on here.
What do you think of emerging as the BAC de facto leader?
I am not the leader of BAC, I am just one of many right-thinking Blackfeet that have been trying for years to push back the tidal wave of corruption that has engulfed the Blackfeet Tribe. Events and momentum may be on our side now, but for years we felt like tiny voices in the wilderness constantly being threatened and attacked. The reason my name is out there are four things that make my role possible. First, I live in Great Falls, beyond the reach of the BTBC and Tribal Police – I was on the reservation visiting family when they arrested me, so apparently they were waiting for me. Second, I am willing to loudly and relentlessly speak out, come what may. Third, neither I nor my immediate family depends on the tribe for a paycheck so they can’t use their favorite weapon – firing people – on me. Fourth, over time whistle blowers have come to trust me and BAC as a reliable, confidential outlet for things they want other Blackfeet to know. So, as anyone can see from BAC’s Facebook page, my inbox gets the goods almost every day and I never reveal my sources.
Most have to keep a low profile so they don’t lose their jobs or face other retaliation from the BTBC. Second, BAC doesn’t take credit for any of the good stuff that has been happening lately such as the indictments. All we do is keep up constant intense pressure on the bad guys with a steady drumbeat of reliable news, analysis, predictions, inside scoops, and the publishing of documents the BTBC want kept secret. Third, BAC will never give up and we have lots more to do.
