Tulsa, OK – The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) elected a new Executive Committee today at the 70th Annual Convention & Marketplace. The Executive Committee is charged with advancing the mission of NCAI to protect and advance tribal sovereignty by representing the issues and priorities of tribal nations throughout the country.
President: Brian Cladoosby, Chairman, Swinomish Indian Tribal Community
First Vice President: Michael Finley, Chairman, Colville Tribes
Recording Secretary: Robert Shepard, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate
Treasurer: Dennis Welsh, Jr., Tribal Council Member, Colorado River Indian Tribes
Regional Vice Presidents: Announced Friday, October 18th
The Executive Committee is elected by NCAI membership: the President, First Vice President, Recording Secretary, and Treasurer are elected by the entire membership; and the twelve Regional Vice Presidents are elected by each respective region. Each of these officers is a member of the NCAI board and serves a two-year term to begin Friday, October 18, 2013.
Two-term President Jefferson Keel will step down Friday, October 18th. President Keel honored NCAI with his leadership, elevated the role of the organization, and served tribal nations well. He remains a valued and respected leader within NCAI and throughout Indian Country.
Tribal member Ron Anchetta takes home the broccoli he grew in the community garden at the health clinic.
By Andrew Gobin, Tulalip News
“Rather than making multiple appointments throughout the week, today we have made available every service for diabetes testing all at once,” said Bryan Cooper about the October 15th diabetes day at the Tulalip Karen I. Fryberg Health Clinic. A day meant to inform about the disease also offers tips on diabetes prevention, healthy living, and general nutrition.
Cooper, the medical director at the clinic, made key points as to why diabetes day is a success, such as explaining the ease of diabetes testing, both for patients and staff.
“Our labs are nationally accredited. Here at the clinic, lab results are ready in 15 minutes, which is unheard of at larger clinics and hospitals.”
Although Cooper is one of the lead organizers, he emphasized the importance of the team of specialists that make diabetes day possible. “The team made themselves available, making it possible to have integrated services to streamline diabetes testing. That was one concern we kept hearing from patients, that testing was too time consuming, spanning multiple days and appointments,” said Cooper. “Today, patients can come in and get everything done at once, and it doesn’t take long to make it through each necessary station.”
Diabetes day is one aspect of a five-year plan developed last summer to create programs at the clinic geared towards community needs. Diabetes day began January of this year, and it happens 4 times a year, to allow for the convenient service for new patients, as well as those diabetic patients that need to be seen every 3 months. The staff would really like to see the clinic become a place for the community wellness center, where people could come and relax and visit, not just for medical needs.
“In addition to dental and medical, we offer alternative medicine such as acupuncture, reiki, bowen, massage, chiropractor, and traditional healing. We have a garden of traditional foods available to patients as well,” said Cooper.
Visit the clinic to learn more about upcoming events and programs, or to learn more about any of these services provided.
Tulalip CEDAR and the Providence Regional Medical Center is excited to share this innovative health education program with the community. Inside Out: The Original Organ Showprovides audiences with compelling health information—presented in a truly unique way—that empowers them to make informed decisions about behaviors and lifestyle choices that impact their long-term well-being.
Inside Out: The Original Organ Show takes viewers on a fantastic voyage through the human body. Actual human organs, such as hearts, lungs, brains, livers, kidneys and aortas are shown. Some are healthy; others have been damaged by substance abuse, poor eating habits and unsafe behaviors. Through the presentation, viewers can see first-hand what really happens to their bodies when they choose harmful habits and lifestyles.
November 7, 2013 5-7PM, Tulalip Administration Building, Room 162
6406 Marine Drive, Tulalip WA
Info: Bonnie Juneau, Tulalip Tribes’ Natural & Cultural Resources, 360.716.4004
Staff enjoyed a morning treat of warm whole wheat frybread. Photo by Brandi N. Monteuil
By Monica Brown, Tulalip News Writer
TULALIP, Wash.-There’s something about frybread, maybe it’s that you can smell it a mile away and that scent brings back so many memories. This recipe was received as a request to test and it was surprisingly good. Since it contains mostly whole wheat flour it offers more filling fiber, which also helps to lower the net carbs of this tasty snack. The recipe indicates that it will make eight small frybread but I was able to make just over ten.
Since it is important to having slightly fluffy frybread, be sure that your baking powder is fresh. Test it by placing a tsp. into a small cup of warm or hot water, if it bubbles up immediately then it is still fresh. If not you will either need to buy more or make your own by combining, 1 tsp baking soda, 2 tsps cream of tartar and 1 tsp of corn starch (optional). Baking soda can be tested for freshness in the same manner but by placing a tsp in a small amount of vinegar.
This recipe can be found at www.diabetes.ihs.gov in the printed materials section. If you have a recipe that you would like to share please send it in to mbrown@tulaliptribes-nsn.gov. Recipe adapted from What’s cooking, Healthy in Warm Springs, Sara Lee Thomas, MS, RD and Edison Yazzie
Whole wheat Frybread
Ingredients:
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup white flour
3 tablespoons powdered milk
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt (optional)
1 ½ cups warm water
Canola oil
Preparation:
Mix dry ingredients in a bowl and gradually add water to make dough. Knead the dough until it forms a ball and comes clean from the edge of bowl. Cover with a cloth and let sit for 30 minutes.
Pour about ¾ inch of canola oil into a deep frying pan and heat on medium. Test the temperature of the oil by putting a small pinch of dough into it. If the oil is ready, the will rise immediately to the top.
Divide the dough and knead into 8 round balls. Pat and stretch or roll dough out into flat circles until the dough is ¼ to ½ inch thick. With a fork, poke a few holes in the flattened circles of dough.
Carefully slide a flattened dough round into the hot oil to avoid splashes. Slightly lift frybread to check the bottom, when it is begins to brown turn it over. When both sides are done remove from oil, drain excess oil and place on baking sheet lined with paper towels.
Nutrition Information Makes 8 frybread
240 calories, 10g Total fat, 1g Saturated fat, 220-510mg Sodium, 35g Carbohydrate, 4g fiber, 6g Protein
whole wheat frybread with homemade jam. Photo by Brandi N. Montreuil
Doug Mills/The New York Times Speaker John A. Boehner before voting Wednesday night. He told his members to hold their heads high, go home and regroup.
WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans conceded defeat on Wednesday in their bitter budget fight with President Obama over the new health care law as the House and Senate approved last-minute legislation ending a disruptive 16-day government shutdown and extending federal borrowing power to avert a financial default with potentially worldwide economic repercussions.
With the Treasury Department warning that it could run out of money to pay national obligations within a day, the Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday evening, 81 to 18, to approve a proposal hammered out by the chamber’s Republican and Democratic leaders after the House on Tuesday was unable to move forward with any resolution. The House followed suit a few hours later, voting 285 to 144 to approve the Senate plan, which would fund the government through Jan. 15 and raise the debt limit through Feb. 7.
Mr. Obama signed the bill about 12:30 a.m. Thursday.
Most House Republicans opposed the bill, but 87 voted to support it. The breakdown showed that Republican leaders were willing to violate their informal rule against advancing bills that do not have majority Republican support in order to end the shutdown. All 198 Democrats voting supported the measure.
Mr. Obama, speaking shortly after the Senate vote, praised Congress, but he said he hoped the damaging standoff would not be repeated.
“We’ve got to get out of the habit of governing by crisis,” said Mr. Obama, who urged Congress to proceed not only with new budget negotiations, but with immigration changes and a farm bill as well. “We could get all these things done even this year, if everybody comes together in a spirit of, how are we going to move this country forward and put the last three weeks behind us?”
After the House vote, officials announced that the federal government would reopen on Thursday and that federal employees should return to work.
The result of the impasse that threatened the nation’s credit rating was a near total defeat for Republican conservatives, who had engineered the budget impasse as a way to strip the new health care law of funding even as registration for benefits opened Oct. 1 or, failing that, to win delays in putting the program into place.
The shutdown sent Republican poll ratings plunging, cost the government billions of dollars and damaged the nation’s international credibility. Mr. Obama refused to compromise, leaving Republican leaders to beg him to talk, and to fulminate when he refused. For all that, Republicans got a slight tightening of income verification rules for Americans accessing new health insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act.
“We fought the good fight,” said Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, who has struggled to control the conservative faction in the House, in an interview with a Cincinnati radio station. “We just didn’t win.”
In a brief closed session with his Republican rank and file, Mr. Boehner told members to hold their heads high, go home, get some rest and think about how they could work better as a team.
Two weeks of relative cohesion broke down into near chaos on Tuesday when Republican leaders failed twice to unite their troops behind a last-gasp effort to prevent a default on their own terms. By Wednesday, House conservatives were accusing more moderate Republicans of undercutting their position. Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a leading Republican voice for ending the fight, said Congress should have passed a bill to fund the government without policy strings attached weeks ago.
“That’s essentially what we’re doing now,” Mr. Dent said. “People can blame me all they want, but I was correct in my analysis and I’d say a lot of those folks were not correct in theirs.”
Under the agreement to reopen the government, the House and Senate are directed to hold talks and reach accord by Dec. 13 on a long-term blueprint for tax and spending policies over the next decade. Mr. Obama said consistently through the standoff that he was willing to have a wide-ranging budget negotiation once the government was reopened and the debt limit raised.
Mr. Boehner and his leadership team had long felt that they needed to allow their restive conference to pitch a battle over the president’s health care law, a fight that had been brewing almost since the law was passed in 2010. Now, they hope the fever has broken, and they can negotiate on issues where they think they have the upper hand, like spending cuts and changes to entitlement programs.
But there were no guarantees that Congress would not be at loggerheads again by mid-January, and there is deep skepticism in both parties that Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who will lead the budget negotiations, can bridge the chasm between them.
“This moves us into the next phase of the same debate,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat. “Our hope is now that Speaker Boehner and his caucus have played out their scenario with a tragic outcome, perhaps they’ll be willing to be more constructive.”
As Republican lawmakers left the closed meeting Wednesday, some were already thinking of the next fight.
“I’ll vote against it,” said Representative John C. Fleming, Republican of Louisiana, referring to the Senate plan. “But that will get us into Round 2. See, we’re going to start this all over again.”
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader who was instrumental in ending the crisis, stressed that under the deal he had negotiated with the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the across-the-board budget cuts extracted in the 2011 fiscal showdown remained in place over the objections of some Democrats, a slim reed that not even he claimed as a significant victory.
The deal, Mr. McConnell said, “is far less than many of us hoped for, quite frankly, but it’s far better than what some had sought.”
“Now it’s time for Republicans to unite behind other crucial goals,” he added.
Chastened Senate Republicans said they hoped the outcome would be a learning experience for the lawmakers in the House and the Senate who shut down the government in hopes of gutting the health law, Mr. Obama’s signature domestic achievement. Instead of using the twin issues of government funding and borrowing authority to address the drivers of the federal deficit, conservatives focused on a law they could never undo as long as Mr. Obama is president, several lawmakers said.
“Goose egg, nothing, we got nothing,” said Representative Thomas H. Massie, Republican of Kentucky.
Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina took a swipe at his fellow Republican senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, as well as House members who linked government financing to defunding the health care law, which is financed by its own designated revenues and spending cuts.
“Let’s just say sometimes learning what can’t be accomplished is an important long-term thing,” Mr. Burr said, “and hopefully for some of the members they’ve learned it’s impossible to defund mandatory programs by shutting down the federal government.”
While Mr. Cruz conceded defeat, he did not express contrition.
“Unfortunately, the Washington establishment is failing to listen to the American people,” he said as he emerged from a meeting of Senate Republicans called to ratify the agreement.
For hundreds of thousands of federal workers across the country furloughed from their jobs, the legislative deal meant an abrupt end to their forced vacation as the government comes back to life beginning Thursday.
In a statement late Wednesday, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, made the reopening official.
“Employees should expect to return to work in the morning,” she said, adding they should check news reports and the Office of Personnel Management’s Web site for updates.
For Mr. Boehner, who had failed to unite his conference around a workable plan, Wednesday’s decision to take up the Senate bill proved surprisingly free of conflict. Hard-line Republican lawmakers largely rallied around the speaker.
Representative Raúl R. Labrador of Idaho, said he was “really proud” of how Mr. Boehner had handled the situation. “I’m more upset with my Republican conference, to be honest with you,” he said.
By: Ross P. Lanzafame, American Lung Association National Board Chair
Harold Wimmer, American Lung Association National President and CEO
E-cigarette use among middle school children has doubled in just one year. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that e-cigarette use also doubled among high school students in one year, and that 1 in 10 high school students have used an e-cigarette. Altogether, 1.78 million middle and high school students nationwide use e-cigarettes. Yet, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still is not regulating e-cigarettes. The absence of regulatory oversight means the tobacco industry is free to promote Atomic Fireball or cotton candy-flavored e-cigarettes to our children. Clearly, the aggressive marketing and promotion of e-cigarettes is reaching our children with alarming success.
It is well known that nicotine is a highly addictive substance, whether delivered in a conventional cigarette or an e-cigarette. The use of sweet flavors is an old tobacco industry trick to entice and addict young children to tobacco products, and the entrance of the nation’s largest tobacco companies into this market clearly is having an impact. Why does Big Tobacco care about e-cigarettes? Tobacco use kills more than 400,000 people each year and thousands more successfully quit. To maintain its consumer ranks and enormous profits, the tobacco industry needs to attract and addict thousands of children each day, as well as keep adults dependent. Big Tobacco is happy to hook children with a gummy bear-flavored e-cigarette, a grape flavored cigar or a Marlboro, so long as they become addicted. We share the CDC’s concern that children who begin by using e-cigarettes may be condemned to a lifelong addiction to nicotine and cigarettes.
In addition, the American Lung Association is very concerned about the potential safety and health consequences of electronic cigarettes, as well as claims that they can be used to help smokers quit. With no government oversight of these products, there is no way for the public health and medical community or consumers to know what chemicals are contained in an e-cigarette or what the short and long term health implications might be. That’s why the American Lung Association is calling on the FDA to propose meaningful regulation of these products to protect to the public health.
The FDA has not approved e-cigarettes as a safe or effective method to help smokers quit. When smokers are ready to quit, they should call 1-800-QUIT NOW or talk with their doctors about using one of the seven FDA-approved medications proven to be safe and effective in helping smokers quit.
According to recent estimates, there are 250 different e-cigarette brands for sale in the U.S. today. With that many brands, there is likely to be wide variation in the chemicals that each contain. In initial lab tests conducted by the FDA in 2009, detectable levels of toxic cancer-causing chemicals were found — including an ingredient used in anti-freeze — in two leading brands of e-cigarettes and 18 various e-cigarette cartridges. That is why it is so urgent for FDA to begin its regulatory oversight of e-cigarettes, which must include ingredient disclosure by e-cigarette manufacturers to the FDA.
Also unknown is what the potential harm may be to people exposed to secondhand emissions from e-cigarettes. Two initial studies have found formaldehyde, benzene and tobacco-specific nitrosamines (a well-known carcinogen) coming from those secondhand emissions. While there is a great deal more to learn about these products, it is clear that there is much to be concerned about, especially in the absence of FDA oversight.
The Elouise Cobell Land and Culture Institute will be located on the lower level of the Payne Family Native American Center. It will help students research land and cultural issues.
WASHINGTON – The US Senate announced just after noon today, the sides have reached a deal that will lift the debt ceiling and reopen the federal government which was shutdown on October 1.
The measure still needs the approval of the US House of Representatives and then sent to the White House for approval by President Barack Obama.
With the federal government shutdown lasting over 15 days, the impact on Indian country has been devastating to American Indian tribes and is at crisis state for many impacted because of the lack of federal assistance.
On the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where the Oglala Sioux Tribe is based, some 340 of the 850 employees – or 40 percent – have been directly impacted by the federal government shutdown. While most have had hours reduced, some 87 tribal employees have been laid off.
The Oglala Sioux Tribe at this time employs 850 people. Of this number, 340 will be directly affected.
Most seriously affected will be 87 tribal employees who are being laid off from their jobs.
Meanwhile, the Chippewa Cree Tribe, located in central Montana, declared a financial disaster yesterday because of lack of federal dollars during the shutdown. Many programs will be stopped completely if the federal government is not reopened by tomorrow, according to tribal spokesperson Wade Colliflower.
Congresswoman McCollum issued the following statement:
“I intend to vote today for the bipartisan Senate plan that puts federal employees back to work, protects American families from the catastrophic economic consequences of a default, and keeps ObamaCare intact. The end of this manufactured crisis, that has hurt so many people, is a victory for common-sense Democrats and Republicans who are willing to put our country ahead of political party. I commend President Obama, Senator Reid, and Leader Pelosi for their steadfast resolve and determination to carry out their constitutional responsibilities in the face of unprecedented congressional recklessness.”
Congresswoman Betty McCollum is a member of the House Appropriations Committee and serves as the Democratic Co-Chair of the Congressional Native American Caucus.
At press time, there still has not been a reaction from the US House.
SAN FRANCISCO – American Indians and other Indigenous Peoples from the San Francisco Bay Area marched from Washington Square one-quarter mile to near Coit Tower where a statue of Christopher Columbus stands in San Francisco. This after being denied access to Alcatraz Island for the first time in decades.
Owned and operated by the National Park Service, Alcatraz Island is the victim of federal government shutdown, along with other national parks throughout the United States.
On the day others celebrate Christopher Columbus, the San Francisco Bay Area Native community has held Indigenous Peoples Day celebration on Alcatraz Island as an alternative means to draw attention to Indigenous causes.
Yesterday, the protesters marched to the statue to demand that a process begins to have the statute permanently removed.
”Honoring Columbus with a statute is equal to erecting a statue of Hitler in Europe where he left so many victims,”
according to a statement released by AIM-West, one of the organizations that held yesterday’s event.
”Let the healing begin …and celebrate 521 years of Indigenous People’s resistance to colonization throughout the Americas! October 12, also known as Dia De La Raza for millions of Spanish speaking Indigenous people’s of Central and South America, sacred Turtle Island, Abya Yala, declare this day together by shouting, ‘We are still here!’”
reads another portion of AIM-West’s statement.
“It was determined that a process will be initiated to bring to the attention of San Francisco Board of Supervisors to find a resolution that will effectively remove sculptures and symbols that represent and glorify individuals at the expense of indigenous lives and culture,” said Tony Gonzales, director of AIM-West.
