Ways and (Russell) Means - washingtonpost.com

Over four decades, Russell Means has led an insurrection, posed for Andy Warhol, aspired to be an assassin and been arguably the most influential public figure in fighting racism against the American Indian. Now, in his quest to start his own country, the road to success might run down Embassy Row.

By Bill Donahue
Sunday, June 29, 2008; Page W08
The voice was booming and imperious as it came out of the bathroom, wafting over the blandly hip decor of the Dupont Circle hotel room. "If you excuse me a moment," said Russell Means, "I'm going to braid my hair."

I knew that Means was not talking about some quick twist-and-tie ponytail job, but rather the painstaking culmination of a resplendent costume. Means is 6-foot-1, with a powerful broad-boned physique. He is the actor who played the last Mohican in the 1992 film "The Last of the Mohicans," and he is the onetime leader of the revolutionary American Indian Movement, or AIM. Arguably the most famous living Indian activist, he performs his role with panache. Already on this bright, cold morning in February, he was wearing dangling turquoise earrings, a crimson wool Navajo vest and black silver-tipped cowboy boots. His broad, truculent brow was creased with wear.

Means's life has been something like a Johnny Cash song. He has done prison time for inciting a riot, and has been stabbed, accused of murder, hit by two bullets and divorced four times. Long ago, he was a fancy dance champion and a rodeo star. Even now, at age 68, he remains a forceful presence -- a warrior.

On this visit to the nation's capital, Means was, per usual, fighting the United States of America. Along with three other Lakota Indians, he had recently severed his ties with the United States and declared himself a founding member of a new, autonomous nation -- the Republic of Lakotah. Unsanctioned by their tribal government, and speaking only for themselves, the dissidents claimed dominion over more than 93,000 square miles of traditional Lakota territory -- a continuous chunk of sparsely populated dry land that includes parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

Means was here in Washington seeking diplomatic recognition from the world community so that he could ultimately finagle a seat at the United Nations, whether the U.S. of A. likes it or not. His motto, borrowed from Gandhi, is, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

The plan was to barnstorm Embassy Row. He hoped to visit ambassadors from several U.S. adversaries (Venezuela and Serbia, for instance) as well as from a few other countries he deemed likely allies -- for instance, Bolivia, which has an indigenous president in Evo Morales, and Finland, which, in Means's view, "appreciates freedom because it's always been an independent ally of Russia."

It would be a four-day mission, and Means was traveling with an attache, Lakotah's volunteer attorney general, Jerry Collette. A Libertarian activist and a paralegal who recently emigrated to Lakotah from his longtime home in North Carolina, Collette is most renowned for the intricate, loopholing legal work he did last winter to enable the supporters of presidential candidate Ron Paul to fly a campaign blimp up and down the East Coast. Ethnically French-Canadian, Collette is 56 years old, with long gray hair and a shaggy gray beard. In contrast to Means, he is a meager physical presence -- slender and only 5-foot-4. On this road trip, as Means luxuriated on the hotel's single queen bed, Collette was sleeping on the floor. "I'm a guerrilla," he explained, "and if you're a guerrilla, you just don't grumble about little discomforts."

At the moment, Collette was standing outside the bathroom, valet-like, reporting on the progress he'd made that morning, canvassing embassies on his cellphone. "I called Iceland," he said, "and they can't meet with us. They're busy. They said to just drop off a petition."

"They're busy?" Means asked. "What does Iceland have to be busy about?"

Collette paused a moment, and then, without answering, he said, "But can we just drop off the petition?"

"We're too busy," Means said, his voice laced with a larksome, sardonic swagger, and Collette went back to his phone, squaring away the logistics for a full afternoon of visiting embassies.

After a few minutes, Means emerged. His braids were done, and now he reached for his sunglasses -- Dolce & Gabbanas.

Young American Indians Find Their Voice in Poetry - NYTimes.com

SANTA FE, N.M. — The memories of long summers spent on Navajo land as a little boy have stayed with Nolan Eskeets, like the words his grandfather spoke from his deathbed.

“Up, little one,” his grandfather said to him in Navajo, a language Nolan did not understand.

Now a barrel-chested 18-year-old, with a rush of long brown hair, Nolan summons these memories — the days herding sheep through the valleys, the redolence of fresh fry bread, the unfamiliar language of his grandfather — whenever he picks up a pen.

Nolan will use that pen and his baritone when he competes this summer in the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival in Washington, D.C. He and a group of fellow students at the Santa Fe Indian School are part of a growing program that has won a slew of local and regional poetry slams and twice earned an invitation to the festival, which pits teams of the country’s top young spoken word poets against one another.

While Nolan and his teammates do not hail from the gritty urban surroundings that are often a breeding ground for slam poetry, where poets are judged on both performance and writing, their team is drawing national attention for its decidedly American Indian take on an art form that has grown increasingly popular with young people over the last decade.

The success of the Indian School’s poetry program has particular importance in New Mexico, where 10 percent of the population is American Indian and where Indian students from grades 3 to 11 lag behind all other groups in reading proficiency, according to a 2007 state report.

Teachers and administrators at the Indian School say the program counters any perception that Indian students cannot excel in English and writing.

“Tears dance down my cheeks in the rhythm of Santo Domingo’s corn dance/Tattered textbooks and Presbyterian Bibles bark violent incantations and shriek curses of assimilation,” thundered April Chavez, a senior reciting her poem “Indian Education” at a recent rehearsal.

April, whose family comes from the Santo Domingo pueblo and the Navajo nation, plans to attend Stanford in the fall. Like other students on the Santa Fe team, she often wraps her poems in the pulsing staccato of Indian words.

“For the kids, spoken word is a reconnection with the oral tradition, a return to the origin of language, its sound, its music,” said Tim McLaughlin, a creative writing teacher at the school and the team’s coach.

Mr. McLaughlin began the program at the Indian School, a sprawling Indian-run boarding institution with some 700 students in grades 7 through 12, many from New Mexico’s 19 pueblos and the Navajo nation.

He remembers well the challenge of getting his students, many more reserved than the typical teenager and “brought up to be listeners first,” to write about their lives at home.

Topics that might make for powerful poetry — ceremonies, families, the complexities of their identity — seemed off limits.

“The kids wanted to build awareness about issues that are confronting native people, but they had to balance that by not violating things that are considered sacred and are to be left sacred,” Mr. McLaughlin said

Mr. McLaughlin, who is white and from Virginia, said he occasionally found himself on the phone with a student’s parent or grandparent, to make sure it was acceptable for a particular subject to be addressed in a poem.

Gradually, as the students grew emboldened by their work, themes began to emerge — the loss of language, the legacy of the reservation and pueblo and, especially, their relationship with their grandparents.

Soon, students were bellowing poems about what it was like to grow up Indian. “Nali,” a poem by Santana Shorty, a bubbly freshman mostly raised by her white mother and with little connection to reservation life before Indian School, recalls Santana’s worn memory of her grandmother, who spoke no English, speaking to her in Navajo, which Santana did not understand.

“Her words nourish and sting me simultaneously,” Santana recited. “I struggle and cry to her with my eyes/A crease of ‘I’m sorry’ spreads across her forehead.”

The poems impressed James Kass, the founder and executive director of Youth Speaks, which produces the festival. Mr. Kass invited the team to participate in 2007 after hearing about them from Mr. McLaughlin, and he recalled seeing the students mesmerize a packed crowd at a San Francisco slam last year.

“They did a good portion of their poems in their native languages, which was amazing,” he said. “They weren’t trying to mimic poets from New York or Chicago.”

After failing to advance past the quarterfinal round last year, the Santa Fe team is poised for a stronger showing next month. They will be the only exclusively American Indian team among the 44 competing. An HBO camera crew has been following the students as they prepare and will be there to record the final competition as part of a documentary.

For the students, though, there is something more meaningful at stake: the expression of who they are to all who will listen.

At a recent performance in Santa Fe, Nolan Eskeets performed a poem, “Letter to Grandpa.” In it, he speaks of never learning Navajo, despite a promise to his grandfather, and of his painful struggle to pronounce his own Indian name.

In the end, Nolan writes that the poem itself has finally allowed him to use his language in a way that would have made his grandfather proud.

“Grandpa,” Nolan concludes, “Let me sing for you.”

After the performance, Nolan’s usually stoic father grew emotional. He strode up to Nolan and clasped his hand.

“Thank you,” he told his son in Navajo.

Be sure to see the Multimedia feature of the students reciting their poetry at
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/06/17/us/20080617_SLAM_FEATURE.html

Winona LaDuke on the Colbert Report

Watch Winona LaDuke endorse Barack Obama on the Colbert Report. She also gives him a White Earth flag and $24 to reclaim Manhattan and an Ojijbwe name. Watch and find out what it means!

Canada Offers an Apology for Native Students’ Abuse

OTTAWA — The government of Canada formally apologized on Wednesday to Native Canadians for forcing about 150,000 native children into government-financed residential schools where many suffered physical and sexual abuse.

The system of schools, which began shutting down in the 1970s, after decades of operations, was dedicated to eradicating the languages, traditions and cultural practices of Native Canadians and has been linked to the widespread incidence of alcoholism, suicide and family violence in many native communities.

“The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history,” Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, said in a speech in the House of Commons, where a small group of former students and native leaders sat in front of him. “Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm and has no place in our country.”

An apology from the prime minister had been sought by native groups for years and was part of a broad, court-sanctioned settlement with the government and the church organizations that operated the schools. The federal government also agreed to pay 1.9 billion Canadian dollars (about $1.85 billion) to surviving students and to establish a truth and reconciliation commission to document the experiences of children who attended the schools.

Harry S. LaForme, a Mississauga Indian and a justice of the Ontario Court of Appeal who will oversee the commission, said the schools program was responsible for making the relationship between native people and other Canadians “so unworkable, so filled with mistrust.”

“The policy of the Canadian residential schools wasn’t to educate Indian children,” he said in an interview. “It was to kill the Indian in the child, it was to erase the culture of Indian people from the fabric of Canada.”

In a rare break with parliamentary tradition, several native leaders were allowed to speak from the floor of the House of Commons. Some spoke in their native languages. All praised Mr. Harper for offering the apology, though native groups remain at odds with the government on several issues, including spending on native communities.

“The memories of residential schools sometimes cuts like merciless knives at our souls,” Phil Fontaine, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, the national association of native groups, told the House of Commons. He wore a ceremonial feathered headdress. “Never again will this House consider us ‘the Indian problem’ just for being who we are,” he said.

In 1990, Mr. Fontaine, an Ojibway, became one of the first native leaders to disclose that he had been sexually abused while attending the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School in Manitoba.

The federal government has admitted that sexual and physical abuse in the schools was widespread. In his speech, Mr. Harper acknowledged that “while some former students have spoken positively about their experiences at residential schools, these stories are far overshadowed by tragic accounts of the emotional, physical and sexual abuse and neglect of helpless children.”

Attendance at residential schools was made mandatory by the government in 1920 for native children between the ages of 7 and 16 as part of a program it called “aggressive assimilation.” Children were forced to leave their parents and were harshly punished for speaking their own languages or practicing their religions.

All but a small number of the approximately 130 schools were run by Christian denominations that operated them as missionary schools, some as far back as the 19th century. Those denominations were the Anglican, United, Roman Catholic and Presbyterian Churches.

Although the history of the program has been reviewed by various government commissions and courts, many details are still unknown, including the number of children who died from abuse or neglect. The commission run by Justice LaForme will have access to previously closed church and government archives to fill in some of those blanks. The commission also plans to hold hearings around the country to question former students and others familiar with the operation of the schools.

Mr. Harper and many fellow members of the Conservative Party initially resisted offering an apology, suggesting that it would be applying current cultural values to the past. Mr. Fontaine said in an interview that he believed that Mr. Harper changed his mind after the government of Australia formally apologized to its aboriginal people earlier this year for its policy of forced assimilation.

Museum Returns the Remains of a Canadian Tribe’s Forebears

A hushed group of people, nearly four dozen strong, slipped into the American Museum of Natural History early Monday, ahead of the crowds. Their cheeks were smeared with rust-colored dye, red and white woven bands encircled their heads, the men wore ceremonial vests and the women were wrapped in shawls, fringed with red.

They were at the end of a roughly 3,000-mile journey that has, in its way, taken years. Unlike the thousands of fidgety schoolchildren and harried parents that filled the museum’s halls to view its storied exhibits on Monday, these 46 visitors were there for an altogether different purpose: to take their ancestors home.

“Our people are humans; we aren’t tokens,” said Chief Vern Jacks, who heads the Tseycum First Nation, a tiny native tribe from northern Vancouver Island, in British Columbia.

With the museum’s full consent, the Tseycum tribe will be repatriating the remains of 55 of their ancestors to Canada this week. On Monday morning, in a quiet first-floor auditorium away from the museum’s crowds, tribe members performed an emotionally charged private ceremony over the 15 sturdy plastic boxes that contained the remains. The ceremony lasted two and a half hours, and the tribe members and elders from related tribes prayed, spoke, wept and sang, saying they wanted to soothe their ancestors’ spirits and prepare them for a return trip from a journey that, the tribe leaders say, should never have happened at all.

“And then we said, ‘Now we’re going to take you home,’ ” Chief Jacks said, moments after the ceremony ended. “These people we are taking here have knowledge, respect, wisdom,” he added. “We live by today’s society, but our history walks with us.”

The remains, guessed to be at least 2,000 years old, have been at the museum for about 100 years but have almost certainly never been on display, said Steve Reichl, a museum spokesman. The museum has repatriated other remains to Canada at least once before, in 2002, according to Mr. Reichl, and remains have also been returned numerous times to American Indians.

Mr. Reichl said the museum worked to streamline the Tseycums’ trip. “The end result was a successful visit,” he said, “and a moving ceremony.”

For the Tseycum people, Monday’s events marked a singular culmination of years of painstaking, and painful, detective work.

The tribe’s quest to reclaim their ancestors began seven years ago, when Chief Jacks’s wife, Cora Jacks, found documents and papers relaying the life story of a 19th- and early 20th-century archaeologist, Harlan Ingersoll Smith. Ms. Jacks said she learned that Mr. Smith had robbed the graves of Tseycum ancestors, who were buried on Vancouver Island under giant boulders, and sold them to major American museums, and most likely others worldwide.

Mrs. Jacks grew nearly obsessed with tracking down the remains, Chief Jacks said, poring over books, researching government archives and spending late nights searching for clues online.

Mr. Smith’s selling price, said Chief Jacks, was $5 a skull, $10 for a body.

“He dug our people up and sold them to museums on all four corners of the earth,” said Chief Jacks, 63, who is hoping that the Canadian government will help defray the costs of the trip. “What happened to ‘rest in peace’?”

In 2004, Mrs. Jacks wrote to both the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where she believes the remains of 70 ancestors who are from Coast Salish, a designation for tribes in the Pacific Northwest, are also being stored. In 2005, Mrs. Jacks and Chief Jacks’s son, Vern Jacks Jr., visited both museums, and then began the arduous, paperwork-heavy process for repatriating remains, first from New York.

In 2006, tribe members began raising money to cover their trip. They held fund-raisers, auctioned art and gathered donations for their quest, which they called “Our Journey Home,” and the tribe contributed $55,000.

(Helen Robbins, the repatriation director at the Field Museum, said the tribe had yet to begin the required process in Chicago. Mrs. Jacks said they planned to begin that effort next, after more money is raised.)

Finally, in November 2007, Mrs. Jacks said, she received the good news from the American Museum of Natural History. “They told us we could now come to New York and get our ancestors,” she said. Then the tribe began the process of speaking to elders and leaders in the Tseycum tribe, which has just 150 members, and other area tribes.

“And then we waited for better weather in New York,” said Mrs. Jacks, 52. “We didn’t want to be here in the snow.”

In the end, Chief Jacks said, the entire trip cost $150,000, with 46 people from the Tseycum and related tribes making it.

Chief Jacks flew into Kennedy Airport on June 4, with seven other tribe members. The rest of the group arrived on Saturday. They were staying in the Holiday Inn on West 57th Street, where they booked 24 rooms.

In addition to preparing for Monday’s ceremony, Chief Jacks said tribe members visited the Statue of Liberty and took double-decker bus tours of the city.

They were taken off guard by the heat wave. “But I can’t complain,” Chief Jacks said, shrugging. “It won’t do any good to complain.”

The tribe planned to fly back to Victoria on Vancouver Island on Wednesday with their ancestors’ remains. Shortly after dawn on Wednesday, Chief Jacks said, the remains will be transported by van to Kennedy Airport and flown in the cargo hull back to Victoria. “A lot of our people will be waiting there,” he said.

And then the remains will be driven in the back of two pickup trucks to Tseycum land on Vancouver Island, transferred into 55 plain cedar boxes and reburied on native land, this time, the tribe vows, for good.

Dems woo Native American vote - Carrie Budoff Brown

THORNTON, Colo. — Sen. Barack Obama has done it in city after city, privately and quietly. Before or after his appearances in front of crowds of thousands, he retreats to a holding room with a dozen or more Native American tribal leaders.

The rarely publicized meetings are one piece of what Indian Country leaders describe as an unprecedented effort this year by the presidential field to pay heed to this small and historically overlooked voting bloc. In the past two weeks alone, Obama, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, campaigned on Indian reservations across South Dakota and Montana as Sen. John McCain met with tribal leaders in New Mexico.

Making up less than 2 percent of the U.S. population and concentrated mostly outside key primary states in past election years, Native Americans are seeing an uptick in prominence because of political and geographic realities.

The prolonged primary season has pushed the contest into states with larger Native communities — states that typically voted too late to attract much attention from presidential candidates. With the emergence of the Mountain West as the newest general election battleground, the Native vote is more highly sought after than ever since it has proven to be mobilized and instrumental in recent statewide races.

“This has never, ever happened before,” said Jacqueline Johnson, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, which is neutral in the race. “In 2004, we thought it was a landmark when we got a majority of the candidates to make a statement to Indian Country and come to our conference.”

Native Americans traditionally and overwhelmingly vote Democratic, but leaders said they expect some in their community to at least consider McCain because of his history working on their issues as a past chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.

Clinton, too, has a track record as first lady and as a New York senator, which both she and her husband emphasized on separate tours through reservations in the run-up to Tuesday’s last-in-the nation primaries in South Dakota and Montana.

“I will be your champion,” Clinton told a crowd on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Kyle, S.D. “I will fight for you. I will stand up for you, and I will work my heart out for you.”

Yet it’s the level of engagement from Obama — a senator from a state with no federally recognized tribes, a city guy with a limited legislative record on Native issues — that has surprised some in the community.

“Obama we weren’t so sure about,” Johnson said.

But from the start, Obama built an inner circle of advisers that included one of the community’s most revered advocates, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. The Illinois senator hired former Daschle operatives with connections to Indian Country and an understanding of its power to swing elections.

Native Americans have built clout in recent years, playing a key role in an Arizona congressional race and assisting in the 2002 victory of Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) by 524 votes. Controversial late returns from Shannon County, which includes the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation, put Johnson ahead of Republican challenger John Thune. In 2004, Shannon County delivered 85 percent of the vote to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, making it his top county in the nation. The Native American vote was also considered key in Montana’s 2006 Senate race when Democrat Jon Tester defeated Republican incumbent Conrad Burns.

“I would like to believe these efforts reaching into Indian Country are truly altruistic — and for the large part, they are — but these candidates know that in order to win, Indian Country can be a deciding factor,” said Kalyn Free, an Oklahoma superdelegate and founder of the Indigenous Democratic Network’s List, a political organization that mobilizes the Indian vote and recruits, trains and funds Native American candidates.

Canada's Aboriginals Slam "Third - World" Conditions

TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada cares less and less about the "third-world" living conditions faced by many of its native peoples, protesters said on Thursday in the second annual aboriginal National Day of Action.

"The Canadian government turns around and tells foreigners that are coming to this country that native people in Canada are very well taken care of -- that they have money, that they have houses, that that have jobs," said Gary Wassaykeesic from the Mishkeegogamang Indian reserve in northwestern Ontario.

"But in all reality, when you go into your own backyard, you're going to find third-world conditions."

Natives' frustrations have grown in recent years over the issues of poverty, health care and living conditions on many of the country's reserves. Increasingly, there have been road blockades and standoffs between native protesters and police, and sometimes violence.

But Thursday's National Day of Action was peaceful, police said, unlike 2007, when protesters east of Toronto shut down Canada's busiest highway.

"There's no violence. We're trying to get our message across without breaking windows or smashing cars," Wassaykeesic told Reuters on the sidelines of the march through Toronto, where obvious signs of support from onlookers were scarce.

More than any other group in Canada by far, aboriginals face poverty, crime, and poor health and housing. Unemployment and suicide levels are also highest among natives, especially on the remote reserves that dot the country's north.

Asked why conditions are still so bad for aboriginals, federal Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl told reporters in Ottawa: "There's lots to do, I admit that, and I don't claim that it's all done."

He added: "All these things are expensive, they've got to be done, and we're working through a list of priorities."

A theme at this year's protest was the effect that mining and forestry have had on native land, with damage from the extraction of resources leading to clashes between business, government and aboriginal communities.

"A lot of non-native people don't understand our issues. They think we're just a bunch of radicals or terrorists," said Maria Swain, who is from Ontario's Grassy Narrows reserve, about 200 km (120 miles) east of Winnipeg.

"They don't understand our spirituality and our connection with the earth."

In Ottawa, a crowd of around 1,000 people, led by drummers and dancers in traditional colored dress, held a protest outside the main Parliament buildings to air their grievances.

Phil Fontaine, head of the Association of First Nations, complained that while Ottawa was going to spend billions of dollars on new tanks, planes and ships for the armed forces over the next 20 years, it could not find the money to improve aboriginal schools.

"It's shameful, absolutely shameful," he said.

On the Reservation and Off, Schools See a Changing Tide

By KIRK JOHNSON

Published: May 25, 2008

HARDIN, Mont. — One of the last traditional chiefs of the Crow Indian tribe, named Plenty Coups, had a vision as the Old West was fading. Education would be the way of the future, he said — a choice to be either the “the white man’s victim” or “the white man’s equal.”

Roberta Walks Over Ice was among those who heard that message, from her grandfather. She then continued the tradition, preaching the value of education to her daughter, Jasmine, 15.

But the zeal for learning that took root in such families is now coming with a cost. Many families like the Walks Over Ices are deciding that off-reservation public schools in this small, mostly white ranching town are a better choice than schools on the reservation.

Hardin High School, 55 percent white in 2000, is now 70 percent American Indian. On the reservation, at Lodge Grass High School, more than a third of the student enrollment in 2000 has melted away.

The stigma that was once attached to sending a child off the reservation — the legacy of forced boarding-school programs in the early 1900s that tried to strip Indians of their culture and language in the name of assimilation — has faded as elders who remember the old days die off.

“If they had all the same resources, programs, assistance, whatever, I would have said, ‘O.K., yeah,’ but I didn’t want her to struggle,” Ms. Walks Over Ice said about her daughter. “Jasmine was falling through the cracks. I asked them to help her at Lodge Grass, and she didn’t improve.”

Home games for the Hardin Bulldogs football team — majority Indian this season for the first time — now begin with traditional Indian drumming, and the Crow language is studied alongside French and Spanish. There is an unofficial line in the school parking lot, one side for whites, the other for Crow. Indian pottery-making is so well established in the art department that schools from other parts of the state now come to learn.

Even the principal at Lodge Grass, John Small — whose Crow pedigree extends back to an Indian scout for George Armstrong Custer named White Man Runs Him (who survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn, fought about 15 miles from Hardin) — feels the winds of change blowing in his own family.

All five of Mr. Small’s children graduated from Lodge Grass, as did he. But five of his nine grandchildren attend Hardin schools, and his daughter, Roxanne Not Afraid, is a teacher there. This spring, the Hardin district nominated Ms. Not Afraid to be Montana Indian Teacher of the year.

The turning tide of students has rippled far beyond education, to culture and the delicate economic balance of an area where resources like student head counts and the government dollars that come with them are highly coveted assets.

Since the early 1990s, Montana has lost about 1.5 percent of its public student population every year, according to state figures, with even deeper hits here in the eastern half of the state, an area largely untouched by the second-home culture that is transforming places like Bozeman and Missoula.

At the same time, the national demographic groove of people moving from rural to less rural places — for jobs, choices and lifestyle — has accelerated, with Indians participating like everyone else.

While schools on many reservations continue to thrive, those in places like Hardin — a small community struggling in its own way as the economics in this dry, rural corner of the West erode — or in Parker, Ariz., adjoining the Colorado River Indian Tribes reservation south of the Grand Canyon, have caught some of the surge. A housing shortage and lack of jobs on reservations account for some of the shift too, as does the simple fact that many Indians have come to see the public schools as better than reservation schools.

For the Crow or Apsáalooke Nation — about 11,000 people, three-fourths of whom live on a reservation the size of Connecticut in Montana’s southeast corner — the intertwined arcs of Hardin and Lodge Grass have made for a bittersweet experience. Positive things, like ambition, hope and expression of free choice, are countered against the harm to an institution that many people look back on with fondness and nostalgia.

At Lodge Grass, teachers have been let go and the number of paraprofessionals who once could help students has been slashed. There are only 357 students in all grades of the Lodge Grass schools, down from 559 in 2000, and the small community of Lodge Grass itself has stumbled, too, residents say, with burned-out and abandoned homes lining the road to the hilltop school.

“We’ve had to tighten our belts, and that hurts enrollment and money — it’s a vicious circle,” said Dennis Maasjo, the superintendent of Lodge Grass schools.

Barack in Crow Agency, MT 5/19/08

Follow this link to see more images of Barack Obama at Crow Agency, Montana.

Barack in Crow Agency, MT 5/19/08 -

Obama Joins American Indian Tribe, Eyes Policy Change

CROW AGENCY, Montana (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama became an honorary member of an American Indian tribe on Monday and promised a proactive policy to help tribal people if he wins the White House in November.

The Illinois senator who is leading rival Hillary Clinton in their race for the party's presidential nomination, joined the Crow Nation, a tribe of some 12,100 members in Montana, taking on a native name and honorary parents in a traditional ceremony.

Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president, was "adopted" by Hartford and Mary Black Eagle and given a name which means "one who helps all people of this land."

"I was just adopted into the tribe, so I'm still working on my pronunciation," Obama told a crowd after stumbling over some of the native names.

"I like my new name, Barack Black Eagle," he said. "That is a good name."

Many in the audience wore traditional feather headdresses and some banged drums ahead of Obama's visit, the first by a presidential candidate to the Crow Nation.

Obama held rallies throughout Montana, which holds its primary election on June 3.

The state is home to some 60,000 American Indians, making them a key swing vote, according to Dale Old Horn, 62, a spokesman for the Crow Nation.

Obama said he would appoint a Native American adviser to his senior White House staff if he wins and would work on providing better health care and education to reservations across the country.

"Few have been ignored by Washington for as long as Native Americans, the first Americans," Obama said.

Old Horn said the tribal members related to Obama because of his background.

"His heritage of being poor, of being an outsider, you know those two things are the commonalities that he has with us," he said. "We've always been treated like outsiders when it comes to government policy. In addition to that, we all grew up poor."

Obama Endorsed by Crow Nation and Fort Peck Tribes

HELENA, MT – The Obama campaign announced today the endorsements of the Crow Nation and the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Ft. Peck Reservation. Tribal leaders cited Sen. Obama’s commitment to Indian Country and to the issues facing its residents.

Sen. Obama’s leadership qualities and commitment to issues of importance to Indian country distinguish him from his opponents” said Chairman A.T. Stafne of the Ft. Peck Tribes“ Our twelve voting members in the Tribal Council passed this endorsement resolution unanimously. I was personally impressed with his commitment to a true government-to-government relationship and his promise to appoint a Native American policy advisor in his White House. ”

“Senator Obama understands the challenges facing Native Americans in Montana,” said Crow Nation Chairman Carl Venne. “His record as a US Senator shows that he cares about Indian communities. He respects Indian sovereignty and is a strong advocate for Indian healthcare and education.

Ways of Ancient Mexico Reviving Barren Lands - New York Times

SAN ISIDRO TILANTONGO, Mexico — Jesús León Santos is a Mixtec Indian farmer who will soon plant corn on a small plot next to his house in time for the summer rains. He plows with oxen and harvests by hand.

Under conventional economic logic, Mr. León is uncompetitive. His yields are just a fraction of what mechanized agriculture churns out from the vast expanses of the Great Plains.

But to him, that is beside the point.

The Mixteca highlands here in the state of Oaxaca are burdened with some of the most barren earth in Mexico, the work of more than five centuries of erosion that began even before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, their goats and their cattle. The scuffed hillsides look as though some ancient giant had hacked at them, opening gashes in the white and yellow rock.

Over the past two decades, Mr. León and other farmers have worked to reforest and reclaim this parched land, hoping to find a way for people to stay and work their farms instead of leaving for jobs in cities and in the United States.

“We migrate because we don’t think there are options,” Mr. León said. “The important thing is to give options for a better life.”

Viewed against the backdrop of rising food prices in a global marketplace, Mr. León’s fight to keep farmers from abandoning their land is much more than a refusal to give up a millennial way of life.

As Mexico imports more corn from the United States, the country’s reliance on outside supplies is drawing protests among nationalists, farmers’ groups and leftist critics of Mexico’s free trade economy. Earlier this year, as the last tariffs to corn imports were lifted under the North American Free Trade Agreement, farmers’ groups marched against the accord in Mexico, asking for more aid.

Mr. León and the farmers’ group he helped found, the Center for Integral Campesino Development of the Mixteca, or Cedicam, have reached into the past to revive pre-Hispanic practices. To arrest erosion, Cedicam has planted trees, mostly native ocote pines, a million in the past five years, raised in the group’s own nurseries.

Working communally, the villagers built stone walls to terrace the hillside, and they dug long ditches along the slopes to halt the wash of rainwater that dragged the soil from the mountains. Trapped in canals, the water seeps down to recharge the water table and restore dried-up springs.

As the land has begun to produce again, Mr. León has reintroduced the traditional milpa, a plot where corn, climbing beans and squash grow together. The pre-Hispanic farming practice fixes nutrients in the soil and creates natural barriers to pests and disease.

Along the way, the farmers have modernized the ancient techniques. Mr. León has encouraged farmers to use natural compost as fertilizer, introduced crop rotation, and improved on traditional seed selection.

Mr. León plows with oxen by choice. A tractor would pack down the soil too firmly.

In the eight villages in the region where Cedicam has worked, yields have risen about three or fourfold, to between 16 to 24 bushels a hectare, Mr. Leon said. Unlike the monocultures of mechanized farming, these practices help preserve genetic diversity.

Mr. León’s work is a local response to the dislocation created by open markets in the countryside. “The people here are saying that we have to find a way to produce our food and meet our basic needs and that we can do it in a way that is sustainable,” said Phil Dahl-Bredine, a Maryknoll lay workers and onetime farmer who has worked with Cedicam for seven years and written a book about the region.

The key to determining the project’s success, and that of similar projects in these highlands, will be if it can produce enough to sustain families during the bad years, said James D. Reynolds, an expert on desertification at Duke University who visited Cedicam last month. The land of the Mixteca region is so degraded that “the overall potential is not that high,” he said.

Over the past two decades, the Mexican government has steadily dismantled most support for poor farmers, arguing that they are inefficient. About two-thirds of all Mexican corn farmers, some two million people, are small-scale producers, farming less than 12 acres, but they harvest less than a quarter of the country’s production.

Rising demand for animal feed has spurred soaring imports of subsidized corn from the United States. Mexico now buys about 40 percent of its corn from the United States.

Increased subsistence farming is not the answer to the global food crisis. But people skeptical about the idea that free trade is the best way to reduce hunger point to small-scale projects like Cedicam’s as alternatives to industrialized farming, which is based on costly energy use, chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Count one more superdelegate for Barack Obama - New Mexico Independent

By DAVID ALIRE GARCIA 05/09/2008

SANTA FE -- If Sen. Barack Obama needs a mere 170 more delegate votes to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination outright, he just got one vote closer.

That's because Laurie Weahkee, New Mexico's newest -- and most coveted -- superdelegate, just threw her support behind Obama.

"After the primary elections in Indiana and North Carolina, it is now absolutely clear that Barack Obama will be our nominee," Weahkee, lead organizer for the Native American Voters Alliance, writes in a statement e-mailed to the Independent. She adds, "Obama has proven that he can campaign in a difficult environment and still inspire thousands of new voices to take part in the democratic process."
Weahkee also had good things to say about Hillary Clinton -- "I’d like to recognize Senator Clinton for her many years of service to this country, and for laying the groundwork for women across this country to run for office" -- but in the end that wasn't enough to push the long-time New Mexico activist into her corner.

With Weahkee now a committed Obama vote, that leaves U.S. Rep. Tom Udall as the only Democratic superdelegate from New Mexico who remains neutral in the race. Clinton won the popular vote in New Mexico on Feb. 5 by a slim margin just north of 1,000 votes -- the closest presidential primary or caucus anywhere in the country except Guam. As a result, she netted 14 of the state's 26 pledged delegates. On the New Mexico superdelegate front, Clinton now leads by a margin of six to five.

Weahkee, a 42-year-old Cochiti and Zuni Pueblo member, was elected to be superdelegate amid some controversy on April 26. Since then she's kept mum on coming to a decision. But in an exclusive interview with the Independent, Weahkee explains how she made up her mind.


NMI: Why Obama?
LW: Well, I really believe it's highly unlikely that Clinton can catch up with Obama at this point. I think she would have to win all the rest of the six races with a high margin of victory and I don't think that's gonna happen. Even her fundraising efforts are now waning and that concerns me especially since she's been pushing this idea that she's the viable candidate. Those are, I guess, additional reasons behind why I think it's clear that Obama will be our nominee.

NMI: When exactly did you reach your decision?
LW: Well, I've been talking with family and close friends since Tuesday of this week. I also really believe we need to get on with the campaign against McCain. And so, I kind of felt it was the appropriate time to make my decision. So since Tuesday I started really asking people for input in terms of what is her viability and I've been saying that to different media outlets. And my own research showed that she's really unlikely to catch up and I decided to do it now so I can get on with my regular work. This has kind of been all consuming.

NMI: Which medial outlets have been calling you lately?
LW: The big one was ABC News and, of course, AP. But a lot of native newspapers, Native Times is one. And there's just a lot of people that have been really calling and asking where I was standing as a super delegate. In terms of just people, I've got a list of 500 Democratic women sending me an e-mail petition for Hillary Clinton. All kinds of people from California and many other places, just different places. I've been getting email and actual letters asking me to consider one candidate over the other. I've been keeping a little tally about where people are going and by my tally Barack Obama is slightly ahead (laughing).

NMI: Was it a hard decision?
LW: It actually was. Because I think both Hillary and Barack have a lot to offer the country. I'm extremely happy both are competent, which I think is very important. And so it was a hard decision, but I really feel that the turning point in my mind was the North Carolina and Indiana races and the fundraising. Those three factors really shifted my thinking.

NMI: Were you truly undecided when you were recently elected by the State Central Committee of the state Democratic Party on April 26 -- or were you leaning toward Obama then?
LW: I really was undecided. Even with in my own family we've been having debates about which candidate to support. And so, at that point in time I was really undecided. I understand it's a high stakes situation, but I was a little disappointed by the aggressive tone of the New Mexico Clinton campaign to challenge my selection as a delegate, because I really was at that time undecided. The aggressive tone from folks here locally just added into the my overall sense that the Clinton campaign was really aggressive. It was disappointing. I was truly undecided and they were already putting me in one camp or another. I just felt it was a bad representation on Hillary Clinton and her overall campaign.

NMI: You're half pueblo Indian and half Navajo... seems like being tugged in two different directions is nothing new for you?
LW: (laughs) No, it's not. Yeah, I deal with that pretty much on a daily basis. But I think a lot of Native people do. I don't think I'm special in that regard.

NMI: In an April 27 interview with the Albuquerque Journal you said you were most concerned with Native American issues as well as health care issues in terms of deciding between Clinton and Obama. What did you learn since then in those two areas that made you choose Obama?
LW: You know, throughout Obama's campaign he's proven to be an honest and genuine leader and to me that's key to improving relations between tribal nations and the U.S. government. I really believe that we need an honest and genuine leader who has realistic solutions for issues facing the native community and I really believe that he's going to follow through. One thing he's planning on doing is an annual tribal summit. To commit to doing that annually is really key to building a good relationship between the U.S. government and tribal nations because there's so much diversity on tribal issues and you can't really get that by one town meeting or lay it on one or two people to work those out. The other thing that was key for me making up my mind is that I believe he really looks at the root causes of issues and he understands the need for comprehensive solutions. I feel like that's real key as opposed to band-aids, not saying that Hillary is about band-aid type solutions, I really do appreciate Obama's willingness to dig in a lot deeper to the issues and recognizing structure and infrastructure as a part of the key to creating realistic solutions.

NMI: Did you ever feel any sense of obligation to go for Clinton since she narrowly won the popular vote here in New Mexico?
LW: Actually, (long pause) for me, I was selected to be a super delegate. Because as a native woman I'm representative of a voice that rarely gets heard. I truly believe that part of my responsibility is to give voice to the overlooked concerns of disenfranchised people. For someone who's from small native communities, we usually lose to majority rules and often times our communities get overrun and have to go with the majority when it's not good for the community. So I don't really feel like that was an argument as to why I was selected as a superdelegate.

NMI: Are you looking forward to casting your ballot in Denver?
LW: Actually I am. I'm not sure what to expect. I'm really honored by this opportunity and am excited to participate in this process. This will be my first time. I usually watch the (convention) news late at night but this time I'll actually be there.

American Rancher Resists Land Reform Plans in Bolivia - New York Times

CARAPARICITO, Bolivia — From the time Ronald Larsen drove his pickup truck here from his native Montana in 1969 and bought a sprawling cattle ranch for a song, he lived a quiet life in remote southeastern Bolivia, farming corn, herding cattle and amassing vast land holdings.

But now Mr. Larsen, 63, has suddenly been thrust into the public eye in Bolivia, finding himself in the middle of a battle between President Evo Morales, who plans to break up large rural estates, and the wealthy light-skinned elite in eastern Bolivia, which is chafing at Mr. Morales’s land reform project to the point of discussing secession.

After armed standoffs with land-reform officials at his ranch this year, Mr. Larsen made it clear which side he was on, emerging as a figure celebrated in rebellious Santa Cruz Province and loathed by Mr. Morales’s government, which wants to reduce ties to the United States.

“I just spent 40 years in this country working my land in an honest fashion,” said Mr. Larsen, who resembled Clint Eastwood with his weathered features and lanky frame. “They’re taking it away over my dead body.”

Mr. Larsen’s standoffs with the central government, replete with rifles, cowboys and Guaraní Indians, might sound like something out of the Old West. In fact, the battle playing out in the cattle pastures and gas-rich hills of his ranch, amid claims of forced servitude of Guaraní workers in the remote region, exemplifies Bolivia’s wild east.

Tensions here erupted one day in February when Alejandro Almaraz, the deputy land minister, arrived before dawn at the entrance to Mr. Larsen’s Hacienda Caraparicito to carry out an inspection, a step usually taken before the government seizes ranches and redistributes them among indigenous farmers.

Both sides differ as to what happened, but everyone agrees that some violence ensued. “I didn’t want this guy making any trouble, so I shut him up with a shot at one of his tires,” Mr. Larsen was quoted as saying last month by La Razón, Bolivia’s main daily newspaper.

Mr. Almaraz said he was kidnapped and held for a day on Mr. Larsen’s ranch. He responded to the incident by identifying the American rancher and his son Duston in a criminal complaint for “sedition, robbery and other crimes.”

Faced with a legal tussle over the standoff, Mr. Larsen now claims that he did not shoot at Mr. Almaraz’s vehicle. “The tires were punched out with sharpened screwdrivers,” Mr. Larsen said. “If I’d have been shooting at people that day, there would have been dead and injured.”

At stake is the 37,000-acre Caraparicito ranch, which Mr. Larsen bought in 1969 for $55,000, and other holdings of more than 104,000 acres, the government estimates. Mr. Larsen, who as a protective measure transferred ownership of almost all his land to his three sons, who are Bolivian citizens, declined to say how much land his family owned.

With his reserved demeanor, Mr. Larsen, a descendant of Danish immigrants to the Midwest, made it seem as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have moved to Bolivia in the 1960s, after he got bored working as a department store manager.

“A buddy of mine in the Peace Corps told me Bolivia was a good place to invest,” he said.

His quiet style contrasts with that of his oldest son, Duston, born in Bolivia, reared in Nebraska and educated at Montana State University. While Mr. Larsen prefers to lie low at the family home in Santa Cruz, the provincial capital, Duston, 29, has been in the spotlight since moving here in 2004.

Within months of his arrival, he won the Mr. Bolivia beauty pageant. He compensated for his American-accented Spanish at the finale by shouting, “Viva Bolivia!” before the stunned judges. Shortly afterward, he was cast as himself in a Bolivian comedy about cocaine smuggling entitled “Who Killed the White Llama?”

Now Duston Larsen is focused on guarding the family’s land, ahead of his marriage to Claudia Azaeda, a talk show host and former beauty pageant winner. Depicted in newspaper cartoons as a gun-slinging “Mr. Gringo Bolivia,” he basks in the showdown with Mr. Morales, an Aymara Indian who as Bolivia’s first indigenous president has made land reform a top priority in his efforts to reverse centuries of subjugation of the indigenous majority.

“Evo Morales is a symbol of ignorance, having never even finished high school,” Duston Larsen said.

Native superdelegates support Obama - Rapid City Journal

Native Superdelegate Kalyn Free, one of the most influential women in Native American politics, announced on Monday her support for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

Her endorsement brings solid consensus in support of Obama among all Native superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention this August in Denver.

"I'm seeing a rebirth and reawakening in this country to political activism," Free, a DNC at-large member, said Monday. "We're seeing something in this country we haven't seen since the late '60s. We're seeing record numbers of people getting involved. The catalyst for all this, the common denominator, is Sen. Barack Obama. He has lit a fire in many hearts across the country."

The Choctaw woman from Oklahoma said she embraces Obama's commitment to bring Native people into the national political discussion, including a pledge to invite tribes to an annual White House summit and to include Natives in his administration.

Free is one of only three Natives nationwide who have risen to the top voting ranks as a superdelegate to the Democratic National Convention.

Nebraska's Frank LaMere, also a DNC superdelegate, announced his support of Obama in February. Superdelegate Margarett Campbell, vice chairwoman of the Montana Democratic Party, pledged support to Obama in April, but recanted after party rules prevented her from backing any candidate until after the state's June 3 primary.

Free, the founder of INDN's List, is at the forefront of mobilizing Native voters across the country. She created the Indigenous Democratic Network in 2005 as a way to bring Native people into local, state and national political races as candidates and voters.

"Kalyn is an effective and compassionate leader in the Native American community, and I'm proud to have her support," Obama said in a prepared statement. "I admire the work she has done to build a grass-roots movement, elect Native Americans to public office and mobilize voters in tribal communities to become part of the political process.

"And as president, I will work with tribal leaders and Kalyn to ensure that they have a true partner in the White House. With Kalyn's support, we're going to bring about real change -- not just for the Native American community, but for all Americans."

LaMere, a Winnebago from Nebraska, and Free have both said the Democratic Party is offering two good candidates.

"The party rules and our democracy allow us as superdelegates to choose who we will vote for, and we have chosen Barack Obama," LaMere said Monday. "I'm pleased to have done that for Indian people across the country who see Obama as the New Deal that we desperately need."

Obama will usher in a new era for all people, Free said.

"In order to win the White House, we clearly need to reach across party lines. He can clearly do that. He can attract Republicans. He can attract independents. But more importantly, he is bringing people who otherwise wouldn't be involved in the political process, to get out there and vote, to get organized and to do the work at the grass-roots level, whether it's in the inner cities, rural America, or in our case, on Indian reservations."

"The Indian vote alone in this election can swing the election," Free said. "I say 2008 can clearly be the year of the Indian. Indian Country can decide who is sitting in the White House."

If They're Lost, Who Are We? - David Treuer

In the Washington Post, Sunday, April 6, 2008;
Follow link on title to read entire article.


LEECH LAKE, Minn. I am not supposed to be alive. Native Americans were supposed to die off, as endangered species do, a century ago. And so it is with great discomfort that I am forced, in many ways, to live and write as a ghost in this haunted American house.

But perhaps I am not dead after all, despite the coldest wishes of a republic that has wished it so for centuries before I was born. We stubbornly continue to exist. There were just over 200,000 Native Americans alive at the turn of the 20th century; as of the last census, we number more than 2 million. If you discount immigration, we are probably the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. But even as our populations are growing, something else, I fear, is dying: our cultures.

Among my fellow Indians, this is not a popular thing to say. Most of us immediately sneer at warnings of cultural death, calling the very idea further proof that "The Man" is still trying to kill us -- this time with attitudes and arguments rather than discrimination and guns. Any Indian caught worrying that we might indeed vanish can expect to be grouped with the self-haters. While many things go into making a culture -- kinship, history, religion, place -- the disappearance of our languages suggests that our cultures, in total, may not be here for much longer.

For now, many Native American languages still exist, but most of them just barely, with only a handful of surviving speakers, all of them old. (On Jan. 21, Marie Smith Jones, the last living fluent speaker of Eyak, one of about 20 remaining Native Alaskan languages, died at the age of 89.) Linguists estimate that when Europeans first came to this continent, more than 300 Native American languages were spoken in North America. Today, there are only about 100. Within a century, if nothing is done, only a handful will remain, including my language, Ojibwe.

Another heartening exception is the Blackfoot language. The tribe dropped to a population of just over 1,000 in 1900, but they have grown again, and their language is on the upswing -- largely because of the efforts of the Piegan Institute, based on the Blackfoot reservation in northwest Montana, with a mission of promoting the tribe's language. Once moribund ceremonies are on the verge of flourishing again. But for many tribes -- who struggle to retain the remnants of their land, life ways, sovereignty and physical and mental health -- what is left can't really be called culture, at least not in the word's true sense.

Cultures change, of course. Sometimes they change slowly, in response to warming temperatures or new migration patterns. At other times, cultural changes are swift -- the result of colonialism or famine or migration or war. But at some point (and no one is too anxious to identify it exactly), a culture ceases to be a culture and becomes an ethnicity -- that is, it changes from a life system that develops its own terms into one that borrows, almost completely, someone else's.

My favorite example of this difference was the question posed to an Ojibwe man by the Indian agent whose job it was to put him down on the treaty rolls. "Who are you?" the Ojibwe was asked, through an interpreter. "Oshkinawe nindaw eta," he replied, puzzled ("Only a young man"). The Indian agent noted this, and the Ojibwe man's family still bears his Anglicized response, Skinaway. The man had no thoughts, really, about himself as an Indian or as an individual. The question -- who are you? -- didn't even make much sense to him because the terms of identity didn't make any sense to him; they were not his terms. Nowadays, unlike Skinaway, many of us have come to rely on ways of describing ourselves that aren't ours to begin with.

In the United States, we Natives now have sets of beliefs that we articulate to ourselves, mostly in English, about what being Indian means. We are from such and such a place; this and that happened to our ancestors; we eat such and such. Unlike the young man who was asked who he was, we think nowadays in English, and we forge our identities with those thoughts. (I am Indian because my parents are, because I live in a certain place, because I eat fry bread, because I go to powwows.)

Without our own languages, however, the markers we use to define ourselves can become arbitrary. One need only change the nouns to see the difference. Instead of "fry bread," insert "corned beef," and instead of harking back to smallpox-infested blankets, say "potato famine" -- and you arrive at a completely different ethnicity. American Indians are fast becoming ethnic Americans like the Irish and the Italians and the Scandinavians, to name a few.

The timing is strange: We find our cultures most imperiled just as some (though certainly not most) Indian communities are experiencing a kind of economic rebirth from casino money. Not only do we have some wealth -- the Seminoles of Florida own the Hard Rock Cafe franchise, and the Mashantucket Pequots own and operate probably the largest casino in the world -- we also have the basis of some political clout. In Great Plains states with dwindling populations such as North and South Dakota, Indians (who are not fleeing to the cities like rural non-Indians) have become a huge voting bloc that can sometimes determine the outcomes of state Senate and House races. Because Indians vote Democratic at a rate of about 90 percent, the power of Indian tribes is unsettling to many Republicans. In 2006, Republican Doug Lindgren ran for a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives on what can only be called an "anti-treaty" platform that called into question the validity of northern Minnesota's Red Lake Indian Reservation and its treaty rights. Lindgren hoped to use deep-seated anti-Indian sentiment to consolidate his base. He lost. But our growing wealth and power has in no way guaranteed our survival.

Curiously, it is in the field of "story" that the most ringing claims are made for the continued health and vibrancy of American Indian cultures and lives. But it's not clear why so many Indian critics and novelists suggest that stories, even great ones, in English by writers whose only language is English are somehow "Indian stories" that store the kernels of culture -- not unlike those fabulous caves in the Southwest where explorers found seeds thousands of years old that grew when planted. One Indian critic recently rather self-servingly suggested that "English is an Indian language." He's wrong. English is not a Native American language; for most of us, it is our only language -- through no fault of our own, owing to a federal policy aimed at wiping out Native American languages. Cultural eradication is a process, and it was precisely through the attempt to stamp out Native American languages that the U.S. government tried to stamp out Native American cultures. To claim that English is a Native language is to continue that process.

More often than not, English was forced on us, not chosen by us. Naturally, one can (and millions do) construct a cultural identity out of whatever is at hand, and no Indian should feel bad (though many of us do) about speaking English. But I don't kid myself that my writing reflects my culture -- or can save it. My novels are exercises in art, not cultural revitalization or anthropology. And if novels published by large publishing conglomerates, marketed to a general readership that doesn't know the first thing about our lives, written in English by university-educated writers who by and large live far away from their tribal communities, don't speak their tribal languages and probably earn two or three times as much as the rest of their people are our best defense against the threat of cultural death, we are in worse shape than I thought.