Some North Dakota counties that are not experiencing the oil boom and growth that have brought the state into the national limelight. These counties are now the target of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s StrikeForce initiative, which aims to stimulate economic growth.
DICKINSON, N.D. — The prosperity seen in North Dakota is unmatched anywhere else in the country. As of February, the state’s unemployment rate sat at 3.3 percent.
For some Americans, North Dakota is like Israel was to the Jews in the book of Exodus — a land flowing with milk and honey. Modern-day pilgrims come to North Dakota because it is flowing with oil and manufacturing jobs.
Pitted against this image are some North Dakota counties that are not experiencing the boom and growth that have brought the state into the national limelight. These counties are now the target of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s StrikeForce initiative, which aims to stimulate economic growth.
“We do have areas of consistently high poverty,” said Jasper Schneider, state director of USDA Rural Development for North Dakota. “Official unemployment rates in these counties are upwards of 15 percent. Unofficial unemployment is actually quite a bit higher than that.”
Before last week, six states — Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada — were part of the program. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s announcement expanded StrikeForce to include 10 more — the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Texas, Utah and Virginia.
In North Dakota the program will target Benson, Rolette and Sioux counties along with the tribal nations of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Spirit Lake Tribe and Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.
“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link,” Schneider said. “With our resources, both on the state level and the federal level, we have an enormous opportunity to pick up all parts of the state — especially our lowest performing parts,” Schneider said.
The StrikeForce promotes existing USDA agencies and programs to encourage economic growth in impoverished counties — 90 percent of all poor counties are considered rural.
“We kind of throw our full weight at these areas of high poverty and see if we can’t move the needle,” Schneider said.
In Nevada, which was part of the second wave of states to use the StrikeForce initiative, USDA representatives first reached out to the tribes, which helped grow trust between them and the agency, said Bill Elder, assistant state conservationist for operations for Nevada Natural Resources Conservation Service and the StrikeForce state coordinator.
“We identified the Native American as the priority underserved community within Nevada,” he said from his Reno, Nev., office. “The leadership of the Rural Development, of FSA — the Farm Service Agency — and NRCS went to each one of these tribes and sat down with them and said, ‘Look, we’re here, and these are the programs and services that we offer.’ ”
Because StrikeForce is an umbrella program for all USDA agencies, it allows them to work together more efficiently to serve those eligible and identify individuals who may qualify for programs through other USDA agencies, Elder said.
“At the end of year one, what this had done for us was open pathways of communication that we otherwise wouldn’t have,” he said. “If we can articulate what it is we have to offer both in terms of programs and technical services so they can make an informed decision about what’s best for them, that’s the home run.”
In its second year, Nevada expanded the program to include outreach to small farmers by having a presence at pertinent events, such as agricultural shows.
“Geographically speaking, it’s fairly easy to do,” Elder said. “We gain visibility, we are able to have one-on-one contact with people, find out what their issues are, make them aware of program opportunities and services, and that’s really the key, is that one-on-one or the small-group contact.”
One of the first StrikeForce efforts in North Dakota will have USDA representatives at the Looking to the Future sustainable agriculture convention from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. today at Sitting Bull College in Fort Yates, said Aaron Krauter, state executive director for the USDA Farm Service Agency.
His agency plans to use the StrikeForce initiative to promote FSA programs and loans that could help farmers and ranchers succeed and grow, Krauter said.
“We also have real estate loans for individuals that are eligible if they want to purchase that pasture land or that quarter of crop ground,” he said.
USDA Rural Development released the Tribal Progress Report on Thursday, which highlights the USDA grants and loans the tribes of North Dakota have taken advantage of since 2009.
Many of those funds were used to improve the tribal colleges, Schneider said.
“I’m a firm believer that one of the best ways to combat persistently high poverty is through education,” Schneider said. “We made it a priority at USDA to partner with the tribal colleges, and they’ve really become first-class campuses and provide the opportunity of a real quality postsecondary education. They’re probably the best example of what’s going right in our tribal communities.”
The Washington, D.C., NFL team is not the only one facing questions about using the name Redskins. High schools across the country are debating whether to continue using the controversial mascot. Capital News Service has identified 62 high schools across the country that have the Redskins as their mascot. Reporter Kelyn Soong takes an in-depth look at the issue that’s roiling in the court of public opinion, the U.S. legal system and, now, the U.S. Congress. For much more, including an interactive map, charts and statistics, click here.
Neshaminy High School in Bucks County, PA, is one of 62 U.S. high schools with the nickname Redskins.
Six months after Wiscasset High School became the Wolverines, the varsity boys basketball team showed up for a home game wearing t–shirts featuring the school’s old mascot.
When the players walked into the gym wearing white t‐shirts emblazoned with the word Redskins, the crowd gave the team ‒ and the t-shirts ‒ a standing ovation.
The game in January 2012 provided the citizens of Wiscasset, a small town on the Maine coast, one last chance to cheer for a controversial mascot that many considered an important link to the community’s past.
After months of contentious debate, the regional school board voted in January 2011 to drop the name, siding with those in the community who considered the moniker a racist anachronism over the majority of Wiscasset residents who favored tradition.
“Some felt like it was the last piece of the past they were hanging onto,” said Wiscasset High School principal Deb Taylor, a 1989 graduate of the school. “The power of the desire to go back to the past is very strong.”
Though the school has been officially represented by a red and black wolverine for nearly two years, some in the community have refused to let go of the Redskins.
THE REDSKINS DEBATE
As the debate over changing the name of the Washington Redskins intensifies in the nation’s capital, similar debates are dividing Wiscasset and other towns where fans of local high schools cheer for their own version of the Redskins.
Some of the schools that use the controversial name have been pulled into the national debate by the Washington Redskins, as part of the team’s defense of its continued use of a name that is often considered to be a racial slur.
In February, the Washington Redskins posted a series of stories on the team website highlighting four high schools that have Redskins mascots. The team quoted principals, coaches and athletic directors at those schools who said they were proud of the name Redskins.
“We did a little research. Some people might not have been inclined to do this research, but we went to a site, MaxPreps.com. We figured out there are 70 different high schools in the United States, in 25 states, that use the name Redskins,” Larry Michael, the team’s senior vice president and executive producer of media, said on “Redskins Nation,” the show he hosts on Comcast SportsNet.
A Capital News Service analysis of the MaxPreps high school mascot data found that the Washington, D.C., NFL team likely overstated the number of schools that use the name Redskins. The MaxPreps database included schools that have stopped using the mascot, have closed or were listed twice.
Capital News Service confirmed that 62 high schools in 22 states currently use the Redskins name, while 28 high schools in 18 states have dropped the mascot over the last 25 years. (More information on our findings).
The four schools highlighted on the Washington Redskins’ website do not accurately represent the level of debate over the mascot in communities across the country where the name Redskins is used, Capital News Service found.
At more than 40 percent of the schools, superintendents, principals, athletic directors, administrative assistants or other school representatives said that there have been local efforts to change the name. Eight more schools could soon join the 28 that have already dropped it.
A school board in upstate New York voted in March to retire the name Redskins at Cooperstown Central School at the end of this school year. In Washington state, Port Townsend High School is actively considering dropping the name. And in Michigan, the state Department of Civil Rights has filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education that could eventually force six Michigan schools called the Redskins to change their names.
At nearly 60 percent of schools that use the name, school representatives said there have been no local efforts to change it. Capital News Service also found three schools with a majority Native American student population that embrace the term Redskins, underscoring the divergent views held by Native Americans about the controversial name.
Tony Wyllie, a Washington Redskins senior vice president and the team’s chief spokesman, declined to comment on Capital News Service’s findings.
The decision to stop using Redskins happened with little controversy at some of the 28 schools that have dropped the name over the last 25 years. In others, it created bitter divisions.
At some schools, students pushed for the change, conflicting with older alumni who viewed abandoning Redskins as taking away a part of their history. At others, concerned citizens brought the issue to the attention of local officials.
‘PIECE OF THE PAST’
In Wiscasset, the push for the name change started with a protest from a local Native American group.
For decades, athletes at Wiscasset High School competed as the Redskins. In August 2010, the Maine Indian Tribal‐State Commission wrote to the local school board arguing it was time for a change.
“Essentially [the term Redskins] is a symbol of genocide. I can’t believe any school would want to have that association,” said John Dieffenbacher‐Krall, executive director of the commission.
After months of contentious debate, the school board voted in January 2011 to force Wiscasset High School to immediately stop using Redskins, leaving the school’s athletes without an identity.
As a result of the board’s decision to ban the name, students staged a walkout to show their support for keeping the name. Wiscasset alumni also forcefully opposed getting rid of the Redskins name.
“The decision was made [mid-school year] and the reaction was strong and very angry,” Taylor said.
Taylor said she was a proponent of the change, but did not make her opinion public because of her position as the school’s assistant principal at the time.
In March 2011, in response to community outcry, the school board voted to allow Wiscasset High School to use Redskins again through the end of the school year. The school adopted a new mascot ‒ a Wolverine ‒ to begin using at the start of the following school year.
But the controversy around the name change did not fade. Fans refused to chant “Go Wolverines” the way they used to chant “Go Redskins.” And the boys basketball team wore Redskins t‐shirts to a game, which Taylor said was one of several “sabotaging efforts… to reinvigorate the Redskins after it had been removed.”
And even now, some in the community are hoping to bring back the Redskins.
NATIVE AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
The debate over whether sports teams should use the name Redskins has simmered for decades. The Washington Redskins and many of the 62 high schools that use the name say that it is meant to honor Native Americans, not to disparage them.
But many Native Americans disagree. The National Congress of American Indians, the largest national organization of Native American tribes, has denounced the use of any “American Indian sports nicknames and imagery” and has stated that such use “perpetuates stereotypes of American Indians that are very harmful.”
Yet not all Native Americans oppose the term Redskins. Capital News Service identified three majority Native American high schools that use it proudly, including Red Mesa High School in Arizona.
“Being from Native American culture, [the term] is not derogatory,” said Tommie Yazzie, superintendent of the school district that oversees Red Mesa High School. He identified himself as a “full-blooded Navajo.”
Red Mesa High School is located on a Navajo reservation, and 99.3 percent of its students are Native American, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Yazzie said people on his reservation care about more pressing things than the use of the name Redskins.
“Education, public health ‒ those are the things we’re more concerned about, rather than whether a team name is appropriate,” he said.
Though he said it was acceptable for schools with majority Native American populations to use the name Redskins, he believes that non‐Native American schools should avoid using it.
“If you were to put this in an urban area where the population is basically white, unless there is a cultural connection, it would be inappropriate,” he said.
He was also troubled by the use of Native American war chants and gestures during sporting events, something that is common at other schools with Native American mascots.
“We don’t use those gestures and traditions. As Navajos we have respect for warfare. Warfare means taking a life. And when a young warrior goes out to battle, [the gestures and war chants] belong there,” he said. “When you come back into civilian life, you don’t take that back with you. You don’t use the same type of gestures and hollering and bring that back into a sporting event.”
‘HONORING THE INDIANS’
A Capital News Service analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data found that 50 of 62 schools that use the name Redskins are majority white, eight are majority Hispanic and one is majority black.
Thirty‒six schools told Capital News Service that the debate over the name has not reached their communities.
In Ohio, Indian Creek High School ‒ a majority white school – principal Steve Cowser said there has never been pressure to change the name Redskins, which the school adopted in 1993.
For him, the term represents honor and respect.
“I understand what happened in the past and why the word Redskins was given to them by the white man,” he said. “[But] in today’s society, when we use the name Redskins, we are honoring the Indians for their heroic efforts.”
At Ringgold High School, a majority black school in Louisiana, Principal Eric Carter said there has also been no community pressure to remove the name Redskins.
“If you show that your voice is in the majority then there would be some consideration,” Carter said, when asked how he would respond to a name change proposal.
PUSHING FOR A CHANGE
Though there are 62 high schools that use the name Redskins, the term has vanished from the collegiate landscape.
The last two colleges that used Redskins changed the name in the late 1990s. Miami University of Ohio changed from the Redskins to RedHawks in 1997 and the Southern Nazarene Crimson Storm dropped the name in 1999.
If the two universities had not changed their name by 2006, they would have been unable to play in the postseason under a NCAA policy adopted in 2005 that bans the use of Native American mascots by sports teams during its tournaments.
The postseason ban convinced colleges with mascots like Braves, Indians and Savages to become the Red Wolves, War Hawks, Mustangs or Savage Storm.
The policy made an exception for teams that have the consent of local Native American tribes like the Florida State University Seminoles.
At the high school level, there is no single national sports organization like the NCAA to pressure schools to abandon Native American mascots. But officials in a growing number of states are taking similar steps as the NCAA to force schools to change.
Wisconsin passed in 2010 the nation’s first state law banning public schools from using Native American names, mascots and logos. It left exceptions for schools that had the approval of local Native American tribes.
In 2012, the Oregon State Board of Education issued a ruling banning all Native American team names, mascots and logos. Affected schools must comply by 2017 or risk losing state funding.
Capital News Service was unable to find any teams that use the Redskins name in Wisconsin and Oregon. But six high schools in Michigan called the Redskins could soon be forced to change their names because of legal action by the state Department of Civil Rights.
The agency filed a complaint in February with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, asking the federal agency to issue an order prohibiting the use of “American Indian mascots, names, nicknames, slogans, chants and/or imagery” by the state’s schools.
The complaint named the six Michigan schools that use the Redskins along with 29 others that have Native American mascots. It also described the term Redskins as a “racial slur…[that] carries particularly negative connotations that accentuate the negative impact of associated stereotypes.”
The complaint stated that using Native American names and imagery, “creates a hostile environment and denies equal rights to all current and future American Indian students.”
There is little community support for dropping Redskins at Saranac High School, one of the six Michigan high schools with the name listed in the complaint, said Maury Geiger, superintendent of Saranac Community Schools.
“The [Michigan Department of Civil Rights] complaint was not filed because of a complaint from someone in Michigan,” he said. “That says something to me, that [the name Redskins] has been acceptable within our school and community.”
Over the last two decades, state education officials and state Native American commissions in Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Nebraska and Maryland have passed resolutions strongly encouraging high schools to drop Native American mascots.
Last year, the Washington State Board of Education approved a resolution that urged its school districts to discontinue the use of Native American mascots. The resolution cited a 2005 American Psychological Association study that found that the use of Native American mascots, symbols and images have a negative effect on students by perpetuating misconceptions about Native American culture.
The Washington state resolution does not force schools to drop the names, leaving it to local officials to make a decision on their own.
AN UPCOMING VOTE
Andrew Sheldon, a former Washington, D.C., resident, is trying to get his local high school in Port Townsend, Washington, to drop the name Redskins.
When he moved to the state in 1996, he was disheartened to learn that Port Townsend High School had the same mascot as the professional team in his former city.
“It’s pretty much a civil rights issue. I think the benefit of the doubt should go to [people] that are offended by the word,” Sheldon said.
Last year, Sheldon sent a letter asking the school board to ban the name, resurrecting an issue that has lingered in the community since the early 1990s. His request prompted the school board to form a committee to discuss the issue. It includes school board members, alumni and members of local Native American tribes. The committee does not include students.
T.J. Greene, the chairman of the nearby Makah Tribal Council, said the tribe does not have an official position on the issue. “As a whole we wouldn’t say the name needs to be changed,” he said.
The board will decide whether to change the name in June, based on recommendations from the committee. Sheldon said he would pull his children out of the school system if they vote to keep it.
The issue has been voted on three times in the last 20 years by Port Townsend High School students, with the most recent vote in 2000.
The students elected to keep the name all three times.
This year, the decision will not be put to students, although Port Townsend High School athletic director Patrick Kane said they are being consulted.
Putting it to a vote in 2000 “caused a lot of tension in the school… and a lot of anxiety, stress and pressure on those on the committee,” he said.
STUDENTS INITIATE CHANGE
At Port Townsend, students were instrumental in keeping in place a name that had represented the school since the 1920s.
But at Cooperstown Central School in New York it was a small group of high school students that led the charge to retire the name Redskins this year. In the early 1980s and again in 2001, the school considered changing the name, but decided to keep it.
The students voted to change the name in February, pushing the local school board to make a decision on whether or not to drop it. The board held public forums to discuss the issue.
Some Cooperstown alumni lobbied the school board to keep the name, pointing to the tradition and history the name evoked, superintendent C.J. Hebert said.
But the Oneida Indian Nation, located near Cooperstown, argued that the name is offensive. As a gesture of goodwill, they offered to help pay for new team jerseys.
“These wonderful kids decided to discontinue the offensive name to our people. We just thought it was a courageous decision,” said Oneida Indian Nation representative Ray Halbritter.
The school board voted in March to retire the name by the end of the school year, making this the last season Cooperstown athletes will take the field as the Redskins.
School officials said they do not yet know how they will a choose a new mascot to replace the one that has represented Cooperstown Central School since the 1920s.
AN EASY TRANSITION
It took Sanford High School in Maine a month to choose a new mascot ‒ the Spartans ‒ after deciding in May 2012 to drop the Redskins.
The school’s civil rights team ‒ which consists of a faculty advisor and a core of 10 to 15 students ‒ recommended to the school board in spring 2011 that the name be dropped. And just as it had in Wiscasset, the Maine Indian Tribal-State Commission advocated for the change.
School leaders voted in May 2012 to officially retire the Redskins. But even before the vote, the school had already stopped using the Redskins logo on their jerseys, replacing it with an S for Sanford.
The students were anxious to adopt a mascot they could display proudly. “The joke was we were really just a big S,” principal Jed Petsinger said.
Students chose the Spartans over the Cardinals, Pride and Stampede.
“The transition has been really easy,” said junior Shae Horrigan, a school board student representative and a member of the cross country team. “It’s fun, [the new mascot] is everywhere now.”
Petsinger said he was impressed by how the community reached a consensus on the name change through civil discussion, in contrast to the events in Wiscasset.
“You can’t take away the history of the school… and [those in support of keeping the Redskins] knew it was time to have a [new] mascot for all the students to rally around,” he said.
A POTENTIAL RETURN
In Wiscasset, the debate over the Redskins has not subsided, even though a year has passed since the introduction of a new mascot. Opponents of the name change are still bitter about the decision to replace the name Redskins with Wolverines.
Wiscasset High School is in the process of withdrawing from the school district that forced the name change. School officials said they want to move because of a loss of school control over the curriculum and funding issues, not because of the name change.
But if the withdrawal is successful, principal Deb Taylor said there is a chance the Redskins mascot could return.
“There is speculation that if we were to withdraw, there would be grassroots efforts to restore the Redskins mascot,” she said. “It is very likely the issue arises again.”
Capital News Service reporters Sean Henderson, Angela Wong, Eric Morrow, Krystal Nancoo-Russell, Allison Goldstein and Rashee Raj Kumar contributed to this report.Capital News Service is a student-powered news organization run by the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Learn more here.
IN DUBAI, a city playground in the Middle East desert, nothing succeeds like excess.
The glitzy enclave has lavish shopping malls; uber-luxurious hotels and restaurants; neighborhoods built on artificial islands; even an indoor ski slope. And, oh yes, the tallest building in the world, the more-than-160-story Burj Khalifa.
One Dubai hotel, the 1,539-room Atlantis, goes all out with a watery motif. The hotel’s dramatic aquarium is fronted with an almost three-story-tall sheet of glass. For human water play there are massive swimming pools, water slides (including one nine stories tall) and inner-tubing streams. You can snorkel with sharks or feed rays in artificial pools.
In the searing desert of the Arabian Peninsula, where conserving water was a way of life for centuries, thank desalination plants for such an incongruously abundant water world.
And, thanks to the long reach of Emirates Airlines, which has helped turn Dubai into a bustling crossroads of international travel, you can hop on a nonstop Seattle-to-Dubai flight and be in the desert, and the Atlantis water world, in just a little more than 14 hours.
Kristin R. Jackson is The Seattle Times’ NWTraveler editor. Contact her at kjackson@seattletimes.com.
Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery poses a photographic puzzle with “Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty,’ a wide-ranging show exploring cultural attitudes about beauty, running through Sept. 1, 2013.
By Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times
Frank A. Rinehart “Hattie Tom, Apache” (1899), platinum print
What is beauty? How do concepts of beauty change? And who possesses beauty — those who observe it or those who are observed?
These are among the questions raised in “Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty,” a new exhibit at the Henry Art Gallery, curated by Deborah Willis, the first scholar to take part in the Henry’s new Visiting Fellow Program.
Willis is a historian of African-American photography who teaches at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she serves as professor and chair of photography and imaging. A few years ago, the Henry invited her to pore through its holdings and those of the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, with the idea of exploring “different attitudes about and cultural interpretations of beauty.”
“Out [o] Fashion Photography” is the result. It’s a big show that weighs how men photograph women, how women photograph men, how photographers turn their lenses on members of the own sex or people of other races, and, finally, how some artists — Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, the amazing Janieta Eyre — translate themselves into the most unlikely photographic icons.
As the exhibit’s punning title suggests, it deals with how ideals of beauty can go out of style, while also acknowledging the role fashion has played in shaping our concept of beauty. Wildly diverse in content, it asks viewers to draw their own connections more than it spells anything out for them.
Willis has divided it into three “thematic groupings,” although she cautions in her catalog essay that “there is overlap throughout, and many images can be discussed in multiple categories.”
If that sounds vague to the point of being unhelpful, it is.
The exhibit is better approached as a free-associative romp through the Henry/UW collections by someone with a curious eye. One question that gets raised again and again, in all three sections, is: Who is exploiting whom in the photographic process?
Willis starts off with works by Edward S. Curtis, whose passion about documenting vanishing Native American cultures may have overridden a more personal connection between the photographer and his subject.
Still, Curtis’ “Two Moons — Cheyenne” (1910) is a fine thing to behold, catching the essence of the war chief’s proud, weathered character. Frank A. Rinehart’s “Hattie Tom, Apache” (1899) tells a different story: The look of skepticism the young woman levels at the camera is withering.
Honest portraiture is one thing. Voyeurism is another.
The voyeuristic norm — of a male eye trained on a female form for purposes of arousal — seems most vividly and straightforwardly represented by E.J. Bellocq’s “Storyville Portrait” (c. 1912). But in other works, things get more complicated.
Don Wallen’s “Untitled” (1976), with its live female nude draped around a plastic-white mannequin, seems to comment on how synthetic some ideals of female beauty can be. Harry Callahan’s gorgeous silhouette shot of his wife, “Eleanor” (1948), uses photographic artifice to create something intimate, loving and mysterious.
Willis includes some actual fashion photography, including items by Hans L. Jorgensen and Irving Penn, where women are idealized by the camera, surely with their own full cooperation. And in shots of famous actresses — Cecil Beaton’s “Marlene Dietrich” (1930) and Benjamin J. Falk’s “Portrait of Miss Rush, the Actress” (c. 1892/1897) — there’s little doubt that the models are shaping their own images as much as the photographer is. “Miss Rush,” in her bow-tie, jacket, vest and trousers, is a dapper gender-bender. Dietrich, here, is in pure glamour-queen mode.
The male figure, if a bit underrepresented, isn’t neglected in “Out [o] Fashion.”
Jack Pierson’s gauzy “Belvedere Clayton” (1992) portrays a dreamy young man, swaddled in a nightshirt, sprawled back in bed and gazing at the camera. There’s something so swooning and heady about his pose that he seems made of gossamer. George Dureau’s black male nude, “Glen Thompson, Rear” (1983), on the other hand, couldn’t be more directly carnal.
In some cases, subjects’ actions, more than their looks, lend a true hypnotic allure to their images. That’s the case with Lewis Wickes Hine’s “Powerhouse Mechanic” (1921) and Barbara Morgan’s “Martha Graham — Letter to the World” (1940), which are slyly juxtaposed in the show.
There’s fine work here that seemingly has nothing to do with Willis’ chosen theme. Weegee’s masterpiece “The Critic” (1943), in which a Bowery character snarls at two preening operagoers, is surely less about beauty than hostilities between two social worlds, while Lisette Model’s “Famous Gambler, Nice” (1934) comes off as a pure character study, with little thought about the attractiveness of its subject (although the photograph itself is certainly handsomely composed).
Diane Arbus’ “A Woman in a Bird Mask, N.Y.C.” (1967) delights in how artifice can triumph over age and take a turn for the beautiful-fantastical. But in Arbus’ “A Family on Their Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, New York” (1968), it’s the total disconnect between husband, wife and child that rivets you far more than the incidental detail of the sunbathing mom’s classic, brittle 1960s looks.
Some of these puzzling inclusions might benefit from more commentary by Willis on individual photographs. Without that, the exhibition is mostly what you choose to make of it.
One thing for sure: There are plenty of photographic riches here — including work by Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Edward J. Steichen and many others — to make something from.
A movie review of “Room 237,” subtitled “An Inquiry Into ‘The Shining’ in 9 Parts.” Rodney Ascher’s fascinating documentary examines Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film from the divergent perspectives of five obsessive interpreters.
By Jeff Shannon, The Seattle Times
The subtitle of “Room 237” is “Being an Inquiry Into ‘The Shining’ in 9 Parts,” and Rodney Ascher’s fascinating documentary subjects Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic (based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel) to intense scrutiny that ranges from critically astute to far-fetched absurdity.
The title of Ascher’s inquiry is taken from the Overlook Hotel, the haunted setting of King’s novel and Kubrick’s film. A forbidden place where unspeakable horrors occurred, Room 237 is just one of many mysteries that leave Kubrick’s film so enticingly open to interpretation.
Ascher invited five obsessive viewers to share their divergent observations about Kubrick’s film. Heard but never seen, their thoughts are accompanied by extensive clips from “The Shining” and dozens of other films, from the sci-fi cheesiness of “The Brain from Planet Arous” to the challenging formalism of “Last Year in Marienbad.”
If the result is best appreciated by serious cinephiles, so be it: “Room 237” is an act of uncommon devotion to cinema, embracing the notion that movies are best defined by what happens to us as we watch them — how our own beliefs and experiences dictate our interpretation of what we’ve seen and heard. At a time when analytical film essays are abundant on YouTube, “Room 237” acknowledges (to paraphrase one participant) that movies can yield interpretations far beyond the filmmaker’s artistic intentions.
Kubrick encouraged such interpretive latitude (especially with regard to “2001”), so when “Room 237” views “The Shining” through prisms of Native American genocide, the Holocaust, architectural oddities, numerology and even the ludicrous suggestion that Kubrick faked the Apollo moon landing on film, it’s a safe bet that Kubrick (who died in 1999) would be delighted with Ascher’s film. It confirms a work of importance and lasting value, which is all any serious artist can hope for.
A federal judge told the state of Washington to get working on repairing, replacing or abandoning culverts that create barriers to salmon passage.
Source: The Seattle Times Editorial
FIX it, pay for it, get it done. A federal judge is virtually that blunt in telling the state of Washington to repair culverts that block passage to salmon habitat.
U.S. District Judge Ricardo Martinez reminded the state it has a narrow and specific treaty-based duty to ensure Northwest tribes access to healthy fish runs.
Martinez’s order last Friday in Seattle ended an extended phase during which the state and tribal parties were to sit down and work out what would come next. Nothing much happened.
The legal obligation to honor commitments made in the 1850s was not a question for the judge. Accountability for delivering on the promise is the issue.
“The Tribes and their individual members have been harmed economically, socially, educationally and culturally by the greatly reduced salmon harvests that have resulted from state-created or state-maintained fish-passage barriers,” Martinez wrote in his ruling.
The judge put the state departments of fish and wildlife and parks, which have done some work, on a path to fix culverts by 2016.
The state Department of Transportation has a 17-year timeline for an extensive to-do list.
Martinez said the state has the capacity to accelerate work because of expected growth in transportation revenues in years ahead. Separate budgeting for transportation and the general fund, the ruling notes, prevents harm to education and social programs.
The point was also made that culvert repairs will work:
“Correction of fish-passage barrier culverts is a cost-effective and scientifically sound method of salmon-habitat restoration.”
It provides immediate benefit in terms of salmon production, as salmon rapidly recolonize the upstream area and returning adults spawn there,” the opinion states.
In another case that echoes in the news, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in March that water runoff from logging roads was more like runoff from farms, and not the same as industrial pollution from a factory.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which was overturned, had found no exemption for logging.
Fish in streams have no options. They are vulnerable to the sediment collected, channeled and discharged into waterways from all activities, including logging.
The latest debris from the 2011 Japanese tsunami to come ashore on the state’s southern coast is likely the most surprising so far.
A small, 18-foot blue fiberglass skiff bearing the name Saisho-Maru was found March 22 just north of Sid Snyder Beach near Long Beach.
While finding tsunami debris on our beaches isn’t new, what was found inside the stern’s built-in compartment caught the attention of state Fish and Wildlife biologists.
“There was five fish total we found in the boat’s compartment, and this is the first time we’ve seen vertebrates come ashore in tsunami debris,” said Bruce Kauffman, a state Fish and Wildlife biologist in Montesano.
The fish are commonly referred to as a “knifejaw or striped beak fish” that are native to waters off Japan, Korea and China.
“Finding these fish alive was totally unexpected and it is pretty unusual to find live fish,” Kauffman said.
Fisheries biologists say the compartment where the fish were found looked like an aquarium with enough sealife growth that the fish were able to feed off that and survive for so long.
“The fish were found in a compartment in the very back of the boat that appeared to have been enclosed at one point, but didn’t have a lid anymore,” said Leanna Reuss, the tsunami debris coordinator for AmeriCorp in Long Beach.
“It looked like most of the boat was floating underwater, and the fish used it (the compartment) as a shelter to stay alive,” Reuss said. “Otherwise I don’t think they could have survived the long drift across the ocean.”
Reuss says the boat was taken off the beach, and is now in the shop at Cape Disappointment State Park.
Only one of the fish is still alive. That fish is being kept in a holding tank at the Seaside Aquarium in Oregon. Once it’s healthy, the aquarium plans to put it on display.
Other tsunami debris found recently on coastal beaches include a large dock, boats and even a motorcycle.
(Photos courtesy of Washington State Fish and Wildlife)
“Our tribal leadership’s main responsibility is simply to protect our people,” said Marc Gauthier, a representative of the Upper Columbia United Tribes, before leaving the meeting. “It comes down to that basic human desire to protect your family.”
The Washington State Department of Ecology has known since the 1990s that its water-pollution limits have meant some Washingtonians regularly consume dangerous amounts of toxic chemicals in fish from local waterways.
At least twice, Ecology has been told by its overseers at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to fix the problem and better protect people’s health. Ecology was close to finally doing that last year — until Boeing and other business interests launched an intense lobbying campaign aimed not just at Ecology but also at the Washington Legislature and then-Gov. Christine Gregoire. That is the picture that emerges from recent interviews as well as government documents obtained by InvestigateWest under the Washington Public Records Law.
The problem lies in Ecology’s estimate of how much fish people eat. The lower the amount, the more water pollution Ecology can legally allow. So by assuming that people eat the equivalent of just one fish meal per month, Ecology is able to set less stringent pollution limits.
Meanwhile, citing the health benefits of fish, the state Department of Health advises people to eat fish twice a week, eight times as often as the official estimate of actual consumption. The state knows that some members of Indian tribes, immigrants and other fishermen consume locally caught seafood even more often than that and are therefore at greater risk of cancer, neurological damage and other maladies.
The Boeing Co. looms large in this story. In June 2012, Boeing said if Ecology went ahead with plans to make fish safer to eat, it would “cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars and severely hamper its ability to increase production in Renton and make future expansion elsewhere in the state cost prohibitive,” according to a Gregoire aide’s reconstruction of a conversation with a Boeing executive that month.
In July 2012, Ecology announced it would not go forward with a new rule to adjust the fish-eating estimate as planned. Instead the agency launched a “stakeholder process” that would delay any new rules for at least two years. Last week that process plodded on in Spokane, where state and local government officials and others spent more than three hours discussing the many contaminants that for years have prompted official state warnings against eating Washington fish too regularly.
“All we’ve seen is delay,” said Bart Mihailovich of the Spokane Riverkeeper environmental group, one of several that have refused to participate in the new series of meetings. “Why are we going back and doing what was already done?”
At the meeting in Spokane Thursday, a representative of Indian tribes called Ecology’s conduct “a betrayal” and explained that the tribes are boycotting the current process because it is unnecessary.
“Our tribal leadership’s main responsibility is simply to protect our people,” said Marc Gauthier, a representative of the Upper Columbia United Tribes, before leaving the meeting. “It comes down to that basic human desire to protect your family.”
Ecology had at least one other false start in fixing the rules, back in the mid-1990s, an effort that petered out even before a rule change was proposed, said Melissa Gildersleeve, the Ecology manager overseeing the current stakeholder process. That followed a 1994 study by the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission that documented how the national estimate of one fish meal per month was greatly and regularly exceeded by some members of Indian tribes.
While who eats how much contaminated fish is a slippery and much-debated corner of science, few of the parties involved in the current dispute in Washington contend that the current fish-consumption rate accurately reflects the true amount eaten, especially by some groups such as members of Indian tribes, subsistence fishermen and immigrants. The figure came from a 1973-74 federal study that asked consumers to fill our “food diaries” for three days, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
GWYNETH ROBERTS/Lincoln Journal Star 1491s member Bobby Wilson (center) dances for the camera as Native Youth Leadership Symposium Participants (rear) watch during production of a public service announcement video Tuesday, April 2, 2013, at Morrill Hall.
The guerrilla Native filmmakers and comedy troupe came to Lincoln on Tuesday to help participants of the Sovereign Native Youth Leadership program shoot a video. The Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs hosted the 1491s’ visit and sponsors the youth program — high school students from Nebraska’s four tribes learning to be leaders.
Last week, to prepare for the 1491s’ visit, the students brainstormed ideas. But on Tuesday, the five members of the 1491s struggle to get students to share them.
Goldtooth, one of the group’s founders, tells students the filmmakers are there to help them find their voice.
“You dictate the direction,” he says.
Ryan Red Corn, an Osage member of the 1491s, shares the story of a young woman they met at a Native boarding school who told them about briefly escaping the school to retrieve berries from a nearby tree. The 1491s made a video about it.
The 1491s have lampooned everything from the movie “The Last of the Mohicans” to powwow emcees, and they’ve gotten hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube.
Despite their popularity, at least two Native students haven’t seen their work.
As the morning wears on, the students begin opening up, a little at a time.
Two brothers from Winnebago speak about their dad, who once struggled with alcoholism but quit after his children were born. They talk about losing their uncle to cirrhosis, a liver disease prevalent in alcoholics.
“Top that,” student Skyler Walker says, daring the others to beat his story and eliciting laughter.
So how does a mixed bag of comedians and filmmakers get shy Native students to open up? Red Corn says it’s important to make them laugh and see themselves as important.
The 1491s spend much of Tuesday making each other laugh, poking fun at Red Corn for being half white and Goldtooth for enjoying food too much.
Eventually, they begin teasing the students, including Skyler and his brother Max, who are half Ho-Chunk and half white. The boys call themselves “half chunks.”
“Half chunk 1 and half chunk 2,” the 1491s call them.
Then they turn on each other: “Osage sounds like a drunk person speaking Dakota,” Goldtooth says to Red Corn.
But then, just a little, the tone of their conversation shifts.
As he talks about his love of gourd dancing in the Omaha tribal tradition, student Marco Ramos cuts short a conversation between Red Corn and comedian Bobby Wilson.
“Quit holding hands and pay attention,” he says, as the room erupts in applause and laughter.
Later at lunch, Scott Shafer of the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs describes how difficult it has been getting the students to open up to the presenters they have heard since the program began its second year this past fall. So often, students have struggled to connect to policymakers and professionals, he says.
That wasn’t the case Tuesday as the students and the 1491s developed ideas for their video on alcoholism.
One student describes adults who tell her not to drink but who then drink themselves.
Somewhere in the room, an idea flickers.
Filmmaker Sterlin Harjo, who has directed several movies and documentaries, offers an idea that involves the students making the video’s viewers believe they were talking about using drugs and alcohol.
“It helps me forget my worries,” Cheyenne Gottula, an Oglala who attends Lincoln High School, says before the camera. “My mom’s the one who got me into it.”
Then, the reveal.
“I like playing volleyball.”
Reach Kevin Abourezk at 402-473-7225 or kabourezk@journalstar.com.
70 sacred Hopi masks that are set to be auctioned in France are estimated to be worth $1 million. The New York Times reports, the auction is set for April 12th at Néret-Minet auction house. Néret-Minet states that the items were legally obtained over 30 years ago and that this auction should be considered a homage to the Hopi Indians and they should be happy so many people want to understand and analyze their civilization.
“The Hopi Tribe is just disgusted with the continued offensive marketing of Hopi culture.” The Hopi Tribe has attempted to contact the auction house with no luck and has sought legal council on possible ways to bring the masks back to their rightful owners, The Hopi Tribe.
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