History > 2007 > USA > American Indian tribes (I)

Tlingit Tribes to Get Ancient Remains

October 20, 2007
Filed at 1:30 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- Human remains estimated to be more than 10,000 years old will be returned to southeast Alaska Tlingit tribes 11 years after they were found in a cave in the Tongass National Forest.

It's the first time a federal agency has conveyed custody of such ancient remains to indigenous groups under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, U.S. Forest Service officials said Friday.

''It's a pretty substantial find,'' said Tongass spokesman Phil Sammon.

Vertebrae, ribs, teeth, a mandible and a pelvic bone were among the remains discovered in 1996 during a Forest Service archaeological survey for a proposed timber sale on northern Prince of Wales Island. The area is the aboriginal homeland for Tlingit tribes.

Stone tools also were found inside On Your Knees Cave, an extensive limestone network.

The Forest Service immediately consulted with area tribes as required by the repatriation law, which mandates that federal agencies, and institutions receiving federal money, return American Indian remains and cultural items to tribes.

There was never any dispute that the remains should go to Tlingit tribes in Craig and Klawock, communities on the island. The tribes and Sealaska Corp. -- the southeast Alaska Native regional corporation -- in February petitioned the agency for custody of the remains.

This came after a lengthy process including scientific analysis that determined the remains were 10,300 years old. Through DNA and other testing, researchers identified the remains as belonging to an indigenous man in his early 20s who subsisted primarily on seafood.

Some tribal members initially balked at allowing the studies to be done instead of immediate interment. But in the end they backed a study after determining the remains were scattered in the cave -- possibly by scavengers -- and not taken from a burial site.

In the remains, the tribes saw an ancestor offering himself for knowledge and learning, said anthropologist Rosita Worl, president of Sealaska Heritage Institute, the nonprofit cultural and educational arm of the Native corporation.

''The elders also saw it as a way of validating our ancient presence here in southeast Alaska,'' said Worl, a Tlingit. ''A number of elders have said it proves we've been here since time immemorial.''

The tribes will file a separate claim for the stone tools, which are from a different period, Worl said. The artifacts are made of obsidian, or volanic glass, not naturally found in the area, suggesting early residents used boats to get around the coastal region.

The find also could support a theory that people migrated from Asia as well as oral Tlingit histories about coastal migrations, according to Worl.

''We're very, very excited and very proud of our people,'' she said.

Finding remains that old is uncommon but not unheard of, said Sherry Hutt, repatriation program manager for the National Park Service. What stood out about the Tlingit case, she said, is the level of cooperation involved.

''The Forest Service went through the process carefully and methodically. It consulted with the locals and came to a decision based on analysis of the facts,'' she said. ''The process of consultation enhances the body of knowledge. This is a good example of it.''

Worl said she was happy the outcome was sharply different from the Kennewick Man, a 9,000-year-old skeleton found near the Columbia River in Washington state the same year as the Tlingit remains. Disputes over the Kennewick Man have pitted archeologists against Indian tribes in the Northwest.

''I think ours is a really good example of what can be accomplished when scientists and federal agencies recognize the legal rights of Native people,'' Worl said. ''They're professional with them, they're sensitive with them. They're equal with them.''

The remains are being held by the Forest Service while the tribes plan a ceremonial burial at the discovery site.

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On the Net:

http://www.fs.fed.us/r10/tongass

http://www.sealaskaheritage.org

http://www.nps.gov/history/nagpra 

Tlingit Tribes to Get Ancient Remains, NYT, 20.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Tlingit-Remains.html

Proposed Deal Reached

for Mich. Tribes

September 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:17 a.m. ET
The New York Times

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) -- Five American Indian tribes will regulate hunting, fishing and plant gathering by their members on millions of acres in Michigan under a tentative agreement announced Wednesday with the state.

Supporters hope the proposal will end decades of bickering over what rights Indians retained when they signed away ownership of land that amounts to 37 percent of the state. The 1836 treaty helped lead to Michigan acquiring statehood the next year.

State officials and the leaders of most tribes and sporting groups were lining up behind the plan, saying it doesn't give the tribes all they want but does protect their interests.

It ''will provide stability and predictability in an area of former legal uncertainty,'' said Rebecca Humphries, director of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

The proposed consent decree needs approval of each tribe's government and U.S. District Judge Richard Enslen to take effect. Several have already signed on, while the largest tribe -- the Sault St. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians -- has submitted the pact to its 23,870 adult 29,000 members for a referendum.

Both sides hope to submit the document to Enslen before the next court hearing, scheduled for Oct. 22.

Conservation and property rights groups that observed the negotiations described the agreement as ''tough but fair.''

''We have worked to ensure healthy and sustainable game and fish populations, to protect private property rights and to preserve Michigan's sportspersons' heritage,'' said Dennis Muchmore, executive director of the Michigan United Conservation Clubs.

In a statement, the Burt Lake Preservation Association voiced ''disappointment with the negotiation process because there was little public involvement.'' The group said it feared the deal would put the lake's walleye fishery at risk.

''But we must accept the conclusion and work towards a positive resolution with the state and the tribes,'' the association said.

Tribal leaders say they have demonstrated over many generations their responsible stewardship of natural resources.

''We've wanted all along to make sure people wouldn't feel the need to lash out because they were afraid we were going to destroy the resource,'' said Jimmie Mitchell, natural resources director for the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians based in Manistee.

The proposal affects much of the western and northern Lower Peninsula and the eastern Upper Peninsula.

The five tribes are the Bay Mills Indian Community, the Sault Tribe, the Little River Band, the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, and the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.

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On the Net:

Michigan Department of Natural Resources: http://www.michigan.gov/dnr

(This version CORRECTS Corrects number of Sault Ste. Marie tribe members voting in referendum to 23,870 sted 29,000, ADD next court hearing.)

    Proposed Deal Reached for Mich. Tribes, NYT, 26.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Indian-Treaty-Rights.html

Earmark Gone,

Indian Project Is One-Winged

September 12, 2007
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

FORT PIERRE, S.D. — From the scrub and gravel, a building rises here in the shape of a giant eagle — a striking symbol, its creators say, for an American Indian cultural facility and a judicial center.

Except that this eagle has only one wing. Federal money for the other has run dry. And even the one eagle wing, all 30,000 square feet of it, is mainly just a shell, ceilings unfinished and rooms empty, silent but for the buzz of black flies that bite.

This $18 million center, once championed by Tom Daschle, the former South Dakota senator and Senate Democratic leader, was meant to accomplish something unprecedented: lure outside investment to impoverished Indian reservations across the region by creating a court system where outsiders could recoup losses if a business deal went bad.

The effort had drawn praise from bankers’ associations, South Dakota’s bar association, the State Chamber of Commerce, the National Congress of American Indians and the 11 chairmen of the Sioux Nation tribes. But along the way, Mr. Daschle lost his seat in the Senate and annual funds for the half-finished project known as the Wakpa Sica (pronounced WALK-paw SHE-cha) Reconciliation Place have dropped precipitously, leaving some here to wonder what, if anything, will come of the place.

Proponents of Wakpa Sica, named, in Lakota, for the Bad River junction where Sioux leaders met members of the Lewis and Clark party, say theirs is the story of a good idea swept aside in Washington’s abrupt distaste for certain pet projects paid for through budget mechanisms known as earmarks.

In this remote town of 2,000, the people who have been planning the center for more than a decade say they feel unfairly tarnished by anti-earmark sentiment, prompted in part by the scandals surrounding the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Representative Randy Cunningham of California and by proposed projects like the $200 million “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska.

“The thing is, this is anything but a bridge to nowhere,” said Marshall Matz, a lawyer in Washington who is representing the center. “But no one wants to hear that. The Congress seems to feel we are an earmark, and earmarks are very difficult now to get money for.”

The South Dakota center finds itself contending with the risk inherent in every earmark, silly or worthwhile. Its champion, Mr. Daschle, is gone, and with him the money. That is the fate of many earmarked projects with powerful sponsors who move on. Those tied to large companies, which can ensure survival by seeking help from multiple lawmakers, struggle less; little projects in little places risk more.

And even though those in South Dakota’s current Congressional delegation say it is a worthy project, this is hardly a climate in which others are likely to fight for someone else’s earmark.

“This is a cautionary tale,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, which tracks such federal spending and describes the earmarks from the 2005 budget as “out of control,” including $1.3 million for Wakpa Sica. “If you had a more objective funding system — not political patronage — the funding would be consistent, and that’s one of the problems with these things. Live by the earmark, die by the earmark.”

Despite new rules brought about by the recent scandals requiring lawmakers to attach their names to their pet projects, Washington has hardly sworn off earmarks. House lawmakers have put together spending bills with nearly 6,500 earmarks worth almost $11 billion, though the budget process is far from done.

But the pace, so far, is significantly slower than in the prescandal days of 2005, when Congress financed more than 15,000 pet projects, by some estimates, totaling more than $30 billion.

In the late 1990s, a group of American Indians and outside civic and academic leaders approached Mr. Daschle about the center here. In a telephone interview from Washington, where he is now a special policy adviser at a law firm, Mr. Daschle recalled that he viewed it as a way to accomplish many things: to tell the history of American Indians and this country in South Dakota; to further reconciliation with the state’s nine tribes; and, perhaps most uniquely, to create a legal model, a court system and a high court that would make non-Indian businesses more comfortable in Indian Country.

Outside investors often fear that the tribes’ independent legal systems and shifting leadership pose too much risk. Ultimately, the new judicial center was intended to encourage economic development — in the form of investment in business and loans for new enterprises — on reservations, where poverty rates are among the worst in the nation.

“You can draw a red line around every reservation in South Dakota and until we have an appellate court, we’re not going to have any economic development on the reservation,” said Clarence Mortenson, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the chairman of the board of Wakpa Sica.

In 2000, Mr. Daschle succeeded in getting Congressional authorization for Wakpa Sica as part of a larger Indian Advancement Act, but that did not include money. Mr. Daschle recalled working to convince his colleagues that the legal element of the center could be used by tribes all around the country and that it was not “just some Indian pork” for South Dakota. At the time, Mr. Daschle said, no one “seriously challenged” the project.

In the budget bills that followed, the project (then estimated to cost $18 million, now estimated at closer to $25 million) was granted annual appropriations of at least $1.3 million for a total of nearly $8 million.

But in 2004, after the budget was set for the next year, Mr. Daschle was defeated by John Thune, a Republican and former congressman. In the next budget, Wakpa Sica received $350,000. For the 2007 fiscal year, it got nothing. The 2008 budget process is not completed yet, but the House proposal would give Wakpa Sica $150,000.

As the center has struggled, the very definition of the word earmark has become a matter of intense debate here. The fact that the center received broad Congressional authorization in 2000 — rather than being slipped into a spending bill as part of a deal — makes it unfair to consider it an earmark, Mr. Matz said.

Others, including Mr. Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, vehemently disagree.

“It’s still a line-item provision inserted at the request of a lawmaker,” Mr. Ellis said.

And at least one lawmaker, Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, questioned elements of the center itself.

“We don’t need any more cultural centers,” Mr. Coburn said. “We’re fighting a war; why should we be spending any more on a cultural center?”

As the money has faded away, plans here have been scaled back. During a tour, the construction manager, Richard Rangel, spoke of ways to stretch the money — lower-grade carpet and ceiling materials. The grant proposal writer, one of just a handful of staff members at the center, was let go.

Members of South Dakota’s delegation defended and praised the project, but offered little in the way of comfort. After all, they have their own favored projects to fight for. And the demands of Indian tribes, in particular, often run toward more basic needs like keeping emergency rooms, schools and roads open.

A spokesman for Representative Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, a Democrat and South Dakota’s only member of the House, called the project a “top priority” and pointed to the $150,000 being considered this year as something she had secured.

Kyle Downey, communications director for Mr. Thune, said, “Budgets are tight these days, and earmark reform has made it tough for this project and many others to get finished simply on federal funding.” Mr. Downey added that Mr. Thune helped get authorization for Wakpa Sica during his tenure in the House.

The state’s other senator, Tim Johnson, a Democrat, said the war in Iraq and tax breaks had “drained resources from many important domestic projects, including the Wakpa Sica Reconciliation Place.”

While work on a judicial system continues, Mr. Daschle said he still hoped there would be a center to house it. He said he recalled being at the ground-breaking ceremony and feeling a rush of momentum and hopefulness.

“It has eroded,” Mr. Daschle said. “The half-eagle is a perfect metaphor for the half-commitment we’re now getting from government.”

    Earmark Gone, Indian Project Is One-Winged, NYT, 12.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/washington/12earmarks.html?hp

For Struggling Tribe,

Windfall Has a Dark Side

September 2, 2007
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

KLAMATH, Calif. — You do not have to drive far into the town of Klamath to see the poverty and the potential of the Yurok Indians, the largest tribe in California and one of the poorest.

Just off Highway 101, past an understocked grocery and an overstocked bar, sits a row of ragged mobile homes behind a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. Beat-up cars sit along the gravel drives, as does the occasional bored teenager.

There are also signs of change. A handsome tribal headquarters and a crisp new gas station anchor the reservation. And slot machines are on their way, 99 of them approved by the state, expected to be housed in a new building near tribal headquarters.

But in many ways, the Yurok people have already hit the jackpot. This spring, the Department of the Interior paid the tribe $92.6 million in logging proceeds, a figure roughly six times the tribe’s annual budget.

Yet even the silver cloud, it seems, has a dark lining. The money, which had been held in trust by the government for nearly two decades, has sharply divided the Yurok people, pushing them into two passionate camps: those who prefer long-term community projects and social programs and those who want the money handed up now.

It is a dispute that has echoed through meetings and conversations for months, and one that has upset elders who watched the tribe battle all manner of enemies — settlers and neighbors, white men and fellow Indians — only to find themselves fighting one another.

“We’re a culture people, we’re a fishing people and a ceremony people,” said Raymond Mattz, 64, a member of the tribal council. “But it’s a rough time for us because everybody is so poor, and the money is making everybody a little goofy.”

On one side of the issue are leaders like Maria Tripp, the tribal chairwoman, who favors programs to address the myriad problems the tribe has struggled with over the years, including high unemployment, flagging fishing, drugs and alcohol, and the dwindling of lands, traditions and hope.

“We’re not going to get another $92 million dropped in our lap,” Ms. Tripp said. “This is an opportunity for us.”

On the other, some here feel that the money could — and should — be used to alleviate the day-to-day problems for hundreds of the tribe’s 5,000 members.

“We’ve got tribal members right now who have been waiting all their life,” said Willard Carlson Jr., 57, a tribe member. “And the thing about it is, it’s not the tribal government’s money. It’s the people’s money.”

The settlement was a result of a 1988 act of Congress that established the Yurok reservation. The law provided payment for the pre-1988 sale of logs on their land, some 63,000 acres about 325 miles north of San Francisco that snake along the fog-shrouded, and once salmon-rich, Klamath River. To gain the timber payment, the Yurok leadership only recently agreed not to sue the government in regards to the 1988 law, said Douglas Wheeler, a lawyer with Hogan & Hartson in Washington who is representing the tribe.

The issue of how to spend the money is up for a vote this fall, and the tribal council is required to put forth a plan. But at a tribal meeting in early August, several speakers were already expressing impatience about the pace of progress. At the annual salmon festival on Aug. 19, the tribe’s biggest event of the year, one parade float included a large sign reading: “Lump sum for all tribal members — 100 percent of settlement, 100 percent of interest!”

Various per capita proposals being floated include adults-only allotments, as well as payments for all members, plans that could result in payments of roughly $15,000 to $20,000.

That sort of opinion infuriates tribe members like Tom Willson, who works at the town fishery and said the settlement should be “seed money, to buy some of our lands back, to run programs, to ensure that the Yurok people go on forever.”

“If we squander that money, we’ll be in bad shape in a couple of years,” Mr. Willson said. “We’ll be nowhere.”

It was not always this way. Tribal lore holds that the Yurok were once one of the most prosperous tribes in the West. Their lands were — and still are — spectacular: lush green mountains reflected in the placid waters of the Klamath, which flows into the Pacific through a narrow sand channel. Legend has it that the passage is guarded by Oregos, an outcropping of rock resembling a mother with a child on her back, and that the Klamath beyond her was once so full of salmon a person could walk across the river on the backs of the fish.

And sure enough, for many generations, the fish and the redwoods provided jobs and prosperity, members say.

But while Yurok fisherman still use traditional nets to catch salmon — which can bring more than $3 a pound at market — commercial fishing has largely faded, they say. The main culprit, in their opinion, is four upstream dams, structures the tribe wants removed, especially after a 2002 fish kill in which tens of thousands of adult salmon and steelhead trout died after low water levels caused disease to spread. Some members of the tribe have sued the dams’ owners.

Logging has also suffered over the years, even as the tribe has been victim to other sorts of bad luck and policy. A 1964 flood devastated Klamath, as did a period of relocations after World War II. The tribe was not officially organized until 1992; it split from the neighboring Hoopa tribe as part of the 1988 act.

“Day to day, there are no jobs here,” Ms. Tripp said. “Fishing is bad. We have a lot of methamphetamine on the reservation. There are a lot of elders who wait year after year for help with housing, for help with a lot of programs. So there’s that feeling that they’ve waited long enough.”

Of the tribe’s 5,000 or so members, only about 1,500 live on the reservation, Ms. Tripp said, including those in remote upstream villages. About one-third of the tribe on the reservation lives off the electric grid, using gasoline generators, kerosene lamps and candles to fight the night.

Cultural differences between those on and those off the reservation have also been aggravated by the $92 million, as have tensions between older, more traditional members and more independent-minded youth.

Iska George, 20, a student who goes to college in Eureka, 65 miles away, said he wanted his share of the settlement to pay for tuition and living expenses. Mr. George said he could see spending 15 percent of the money on educational scholarships, but argued that the bulk should go to tribe members. “So I can get out of here and have a life,” he said, “and not be stuck on the reservation like everybody else is.”

Others want a compromise, with some money for programs and a per-capita payment. “I think I’d give out nine pieces of pie,” said Paul Van Menchelen, 47, a former drinker who pulled his life together and now sells salmon jerky by the side of Highway 101. He would divide the money, he said, into “$10 million each for elders, alcoholics, business owners. And I’d save some for that rainy day.”

Ms. Tripp said she would support a little money for both sides.

Right now, however, the Yurok heart seems conflicted. In July, the tribe held a brush dance, traditionally used to help heal a child, in this case a young member with asthma. Mr. Mattz, the councilman who was the plaintiff in a 1973 Supreme Court case that won for the tribe the right to fish in the Klamath, said attendance was larger than he had seen at a ceremony for a long time.

“It seemed like people needed that dance so bad, and I haven’t felt that in years,” he said. “I think it’s because of this money and people fighting. I think they needed the ceremony to get their thoughts on the river and the culture. It was a good feeling.”

    For Struggling Tribe, Windfall Has a Dark Side, NYT, 2.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/us/02yurok.html?hp

Indian Tribe Becomes Force

in West’s Energy Boom

July 24, 2007
The New York Times
By SUSAN MORAN

IGNACIO, Colo. — Many American Indian tribes count on money-losing casino gamblers to generate most of the income for their members. The Southern Ute tribe, whose 700,000-acre reservation here in the San Juan Basin sits on one of the world’s richest deposits of methane found in coal seams, is a lot luckier.

After many years of struggling to gain control of its natural resources from big energy companies, the Southern Utes now control the distribution of roughly 1 percent of the nation’s natural gas supply. Thanks to high gas prices in recent years and lucrative investments in and beyond the energy sectors, this once-impoverished tribe is now worth about $4 billion. Each of its 1,400 members is a millionaire many times over, on paper anyway.

The Southern Utes are not just sitting on their wealth. They have become a model for other resource-based tribes and an energy powerhouse in Colorado. And as gas prices have softened, the tribe has recently sought to diversify by becoming a real estate investor, too, buying up swaths of valuable land and buildings in La Plata County and throughout the West.

The local area has benefited from the tribe’s largess as the biggest, and, many say, its most generous employer. But some residents are wary and even suspicious of the tribe’s newfound clout.

“The point is, no one knows what the tribe’s plans are,” said Josh Joshwick, a former county commissioner who currently works for an environmental organization in Durango on oil and gas issues. “I guarantee, it’ll have a bigger impact than any organization on this community and on the whole La Plata County.”

The tribe, which runs its various businesses through an arm known as the Growth Fund, is extending its reach. It recently donated 25 acres on the eastern edge of Durango, the largest town in southern Colorado, so that an old hospital the county had outgrown could be rebuilt and expanded. The giveaway also made good business sense; the hospital, which opened a year ago, is attracting ancillary businesses and employees to a sprawling residential and commercial development called Three Springs that the tribe is building on 1,400 acres it owns.

“You’ll hear some people say they liked the tribe better when it was poor,” said a local resident who declined to be identified for fear of jeopardizing relations between the tribe and the county.

Clement Frost, the Southern Ute chairman, hears that kind of talk often.

“I don’t think people outside can accept how quickly the tribe has progressed to where we’ve become a political and economic force,” he said in a recent interview in his spacious office in the tribal capital here in Ignacio.

As a modern tribal leader, Mr. Frost wears many hats. One morning, he attended a retreat to make decisions about investing millions more of the tribe’s funds in new ventures aimed at preserving wealth for future generations long after the last well is pumped dry. As evening approached he delivered the welcoming talk at a powwow. The next day he branded calves and bulls on his 158-acre ranch.

From his office window he used to look at double-wide trailers. Now he sees a plush $9.4 million recreation and community center built in 2000; a new elementary school; and a three-story, curved-glass building erected in 2005 that houses the tribe’s business umbrella. Just up the road is a large construction site where a 150-room casino and conference center is going up to replace the existing 35-room gambling hall.

If some neighbors have been reluctant to accept the Southern Utes’ newfound financial prowess, Wall Street has not. In 2001, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings issued the tribe its first bond rating: a triple-A. Earlier this year both firms reaffirmed their ratings.

“A big factor was the Southern Ute tribe’s tremendous amount of reserves relative to the amount of need,” said Karl Jacob, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s who covers Native American tribes. “In a normal world, if you have reserves 50 percent of operations you’re looking pretty strong. The tribe’s reserves in its general fund in 2006 were 21.6 times expenditures.”

He attributed the tribe’s sustained financial strength in part to business executives like Bob Zahradnik, who is a not a Native American. Formerly with Exxon, he went to work for the tribe in 1988 to help monitor energy companies’ compliance with leases and to evaluate its mineral assets to bolster its negotiating clout.

In 1991 Mr. Zahradnik drafted a business plan for the first tribe-owned energy business. Within a year he convinced the tribal council to begin the start-up, called the Red Willow Production Company, with $8 million in seed capital.

When the tribe started buying back existing wells and leases, few lenders would shake Mr. Zahradnik’s hand, much less extend their wallets.

“We couldn’t get any financing,” Mr. Zahradnik said during a break from a two-day tribal leaders retreat at a golfing resort north of Durango. “Before we closed our first deal with Conoco and got in trade publications nobody believed we were credible. Now, with substantial assets and a triple-A credit rating, everybody wants to be our friend.”

Mr. Zahradnik has been the Growth Fund’s operating director since its inception in 2000. The fund’s executive director is Bruce Valdez, a Southern Ute who was raised on the reservation and worked for Arco before joining the tribal business two years ago.

“We’ve come a long way from the tribe I grew up with to the tribe we are today,” the soft-spoken Mr. Valdez said in an interview while drinking tea with Mr. Zahradnik.

Wealth did not come suddenly to the Southern Utes, nor without struggle. Originally they were one of seven bands of the Ute tribe, which occupied nearly one-third of Colorado. In the 1870s the state’s governor, Frederick Pitkin, in his drive to open up the Rocky Mountain’s western slope to non-Indian settlers, ripped apart a major treaty.

What became the Southern Ute tribe ended up with a fraction of the original land, and the reservation became a checkerboard of Southern Utes and non-Indians. Some 9,500 non-Indians live on the reservation today, far outnumbering the 1,000 Southern Utes (another 400 members live off the reservation) and 433 Native Americans of other tribes.

After cutting deals with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, energy companies began drilling in the 1950s for natural gas. The tribe had little say, and received only paltry royalties. By the late 1980s, the energy boom was in full swing. As late as 1990 the Southern Ute tribe was still dirt poor, even though 63 oil and gas companies operated on its land.

A major turning point came in 1991, when under the leadership of then-chairman, Leonard Burch, the tribe started buying back drilling rights and hiring its own oilmen to run the wells. Red Willow became the vehicle to manage energy production.

“What tribes have been all about in modern history is taking back their reservations,” said Charles Wilkinson, a law professor at the University of Colorado specializing in Native American law. “When the Southern Utes put a hold on oil and gas leasing, that was as powerful a statement as any tribe had made. It has been a signature of economic development for successful tribes, and this tribe has been as successful as they come.”

Red Willow now has interests in more than 1,000 wells and operates more than 450 on the reservation, making it the second largest here behind only BP. It is the 13th largest privately held energy producer in the United States, according to The Oil & Gas Financial Journal.

The tribe employs more than 600 people in several states and is adding 10 jobs each month. It manages several subsidiaries, most started since 2000. The energy division owns 3,000 miles of pipelines, and it processes natural gas and delivers it to transmission pipelines and elsewhere. The energy businesses account for 93 percent of the Growth Fund’s net income, according to Mr. Zahradnik, who would not disclose absolute figures.

With natural gas production now dwindling from its peak in 2004 by 10 percent a year, the Fund’s managers are aggressively expanding nonenergy investments, building commercial and residential complexes in Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Missouri and other states. Rent and other income from the properties is growing rapidly but it still generates only about 4 percent of net income.

Some Southern Ute members have complained that the tribe relies too heavily on whites to run its businesses. Despite a policy to give preference to tribal members, only 61 of the fund’s 631 employees are Southern Utes and another 40 are Native Americans of other tribes.

Mr. Valdez, the only Southern Ute in a major business executive position, said he and others are actively trying to train and hire tribal members. One problem, he said, is that individual tribe members already receive a healthy income from the tribal coffers, diminishing, for some, the motivation to work.

Years ago, teenagers received a lump sum when they turned 18. Some binged on alcohol and drugs. Some bought fancy race cars. In 1995 a teenage Southern Ute girl, who was Mr. Frost’s niece, was killed by robbers after she cashed an “18 money” check worth thousands of dollars.

After that tragedy the tribal council tightened the purse strings. It now distributes trust money in smaller installments to members under 25 and it holds off doling out cash until young members finish high school or get a G.E.D. As adults, tribal members receive a monthly check — roughly $1,400 at today’s prices — that remains constant in real terms until at age 60 they become eligible for an elder’s pension of about $65,000 a year.

The tribe now offers full scholarships and living stipends for college. Dewayne Evensen is one of the more mature recipients. He entered a community college in New Mexico at age 47 before attending Northeastern State University in Oklahoma, where he earned both an undergraduate and a master’s degree in business. He now works for a tribal subsidiary in Tulsa.

Mr. Dewayne, 52, said he was grateful, but he is exploring other opportunities, including law school.

“The tribe has also given me the ability to seek other avenues,” he said. “On the other hand, the Growth Fund is so huge right now that it’d be hard to get around it.”

    Indian Tribe Becomes Force in West’s Energy Boom, NYT, 24.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/business/24tribe.html

Indians Widen Old Outlet

in Youth Lacrosse

July 13, 2007
The New York Times
By WINNIE HU

ONEIDA TERRITORY, N.Y., July 9 — Tim Glass’s mother tells him that he was born with a lacrosse stick in his hand, because his ancestors invented the game. Tim, 14, and his two younger brothers sometimes practice their chosen sport in T-shirts that say, “It’s in our blood.”

Here on Oneida land, roughly 25 miles east of Syracuse, they are part of a new generation of American Indians reasserting their heritage through a game that was invented by their ancestors but in recent decades has been perceived mainly as the province of prep schools and elite colleges.

Over the past four years, the North American Minor Lacrosse Association has grown into a league of six American Indian teams, each with different age divisions, in upstate New York, with 1,000 players ages 3 to 20. Some upstate Indian tribes, newly prosperous from gambling profits and keen to preserve their past, have hired coaches and referees, bought equipment and refurbished playing fields.

Last month, the Seneca tribe spent $97,000 on artificial turf to upgrade a lacrosse stadium on the Allegany Reservation, about 50 miles south of Buffalo. In Lewiston, just northeast of Niagara Falls, the Tuscaroras are building a lacrosse park with six playing areas. The popular contests often draw hundreds of spectators for daylong picnics and festivities, helping unite disparate tribes in a culture often splintered by ancient and modern rivalries.

“It’s not an elite sport to us, it’s a way of life,” said Randi Rourke, editor of Indian Country Today, a leading native newspaper, who pointed to a tradition in which fathers and grandfathers present lacrosse sticks to baby boys. “You play it the moment you can walk. We call it a ‘medicine game’ because it makes people happy to watch, so it’s a kind of medicine.”

Brian Patterson, president of the United South and Eastern Tribes, which represents 24 tribes primarily east of the Mississippi River, said the renewed interest in lacrosse was part of a broader movement to revive Indian languages and traditions in a younger generation. He said he had encouraged young people like his 11-year-old son, Schuyler, who plays for the Oneida Silverhawks, to draw strength and courage from lacrosse, as their ancestors did, to ward off modern-day pressures and problems like drugs and alcohol.

“It’s more than a game; it’s truly an identity for us,” Mr. Patterson said. “With new resources available to the tribal nations, we’re able to provide a future for our people by securing our past.”

Beyond the reservations, lacrosse is among the country’s fastest-growing sports. The number of players on organized teams jumped to 426,000 last year from 254,000 in 2001, according to U.S. Lacrosse, a nonprofit group that promotes the sport.

American Indians have played lacrosse for centuries. Missionaries documented their contests as long ago as the 1630s. Such early matches could involve hundreds of men, and last for days in fields spanning miles. Players often used sticks carved from trees and balls fashioned from wood, stone or rawhide. The games were considered a rite of passage for young men, attesting to their strength and power.

Pickup games never disappeared from reservations, where lacrosse was often considered a gift from the Creator and games were played to heal the sick, settle conflicts and even prepare for war. But the organized league has increased participation and led more Indians to play in high school.

John Jiloty, the editor in chief of Inside Lacrosse magazine, predicted that “there’s a pretty big wave of Native Americans who are going to be entering the four-year college ranks in the next few years, and they’re going to make a big impact.”

The league’s six teams — their Web site is namlax.com — play what is known as box lacrosse, a summer version believed to have begun in Canada in the 1930s to keep hockey rinks busy in the off-season. It takes place in an arena rather than on a larger open field, has six athletes per side instead of 10, and generally features faster, more intense action.

While the teams do not wear native clothing or have tribal sideline chants, the players say they adhere to the spirit of the game played hundreds of years ago.

For instance, the Onondaga Red Hawks and the Tonawanda Braves do not allow girls to play, and male players on some other teams forbid women to touch their sticks for fear such contact could cost them the protection of the Creator during games. If a stick has been touched by a woman or girl, some native lore says it must be put away for seven days, and some Tonawanda players have been known to discard or give away such sticks.

Brennan Taylor, 18, an Allegany player, says that while the game has changed over time, he still finds comfort and meaning in its traditions. “Hundreds of years ago, they used to play it for its healing power,” he said. “It will always be healing to me because you’re staying active, and running and improving yourself.”

Before the Allegany team began in 2000, Jon Printup used to shuttle his oldest son, Othayonih, to another reservation 45 minutes from home, twice a week, for practices and to Canada on weekends for games. Now, the Allegany Arrows have 121 players in seven age groups.

“Everyone just got into it on the reservation,” said Othayonih, 15, whose name means wolf in the Seneca language. “I’m just proud that I’m native and I play.”

Here in the Oneida Territory, the tribe built a lacrosse stadium in 1990, down the road from a ceremonial meeting place known as the cookhouse. For years, the stadium was largely unused because there were too few players, and rainstorms soaked the grass-and-dirt floor, leaving players to scoop out water with buckets. Adult teams sporadically formed and disbanded.

But two years after the Oneida youth team started in 2003, the stadium floor was resurfaced in blacktop, and now it is used almost daily in summer for recreation and competition. In the off-season, the Silverhawks scrimmage every Monday night on an indoor basketball court. Ronald Patterson, an Oneida coach, teaches the young players the painstaking, yearlong process of making by hand the traditional wood sticks their ancestors used.

The three Glass brothers — Tim, Aaron and Austin — switched to lacrosse from Little League baseball three years ago. A short time later, their two stepbrothers, who are of Italian descent, joined the team, which is not limited to American Indians. One stepbrother, Damien Ceraulo, now brags: “I’m good at lacrosse, too, so I must be native.”

During a game against Allegany on Sunday, the Oneida Silverhawks and their parents cheered, banged on chairs and shouted at the referees over penalty calls. Afterward, Tim Glass showed off a bruise on each arm, left by the opposing team’s sticks, to his mother, Mandy Ceraulo, a box office supervisor at the Oneidas’ Turning Stone Resort and Casino in Verona.

“War marks,” said Mrs. Ceraulo, 34, pausing to admire the bluish circles. “They change when they have a stick in their hands. They stand up straighter, and they get more aggressive, and then they put the stick down, and they change back.”

    Indians Widen Old Outlet in Youth Lacrosse, NYT, 13.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/nyregion/13lacrosse.html?hp

Piles of rocks spark

an American Indian mystery

Fri May 18, 2007
12:03PM EDT
Reuters
By Jason Szep

NORTH SMITHFIELD, Rhode Island (Reuters) - In a thick forest of maple, willow and oak trees where 17th century European settlers fought hundreds of American Indians, algae-covered stones are arranged in mysterious piles.

Wilfred Greene, the 70-year-old chief of the Wampanoag Nation's Seaconke Indian tribe, says the stone mounds are part of a massive Indian burial ground, possibly one of the nation's largest, that went unnoticed until a few years ago.

"When I came up here and looked at this, I was overwhelmed," said Greene, a wiry former boxer, standing next to one of at least 100 stone piles -- each about 3 feet (1 meter) high and 4 feet wide -- on private land in this northern Rhode Island town of about 10,600 people.

"I know it has significance -- absolutely," he said.

But Narragansett Improvement Co. disagrees, and says it will press on with plans to build a 122-lot housing project over 200 acres (80-hectares) in the area near the Massachusetts border.

The firm has hired an archeologist who studied the stones and concluded they were likely left in piles by early European settlers who built a network of stone walls in the area, said company president John Everson.

"I don't believe any of these Indian artifacts are on my land," he said. "The whole area is very stony."

The case illustrates sporadic tension between developers and Native Americans in rural New England, where land disputes fester nearly 400 years after British Puritans sailed into Massachusetts Bay and settled the area.

Across state lines, the Mashpee Wampanoag Indians, who won federal recognition as a tribe on February 15, said this month they want ownership of a 22,000-acre (8,900-hectare) military reservation in Massachusetts to create a free-trade zone.

Historians, state officials, private developers and tribal leaders in Rhode Island agree that Nipsachuck woods, where Greene identified the stone mounds two years ago, is culturally and historically significant for local Indians.

It was the scene of three battles in the King Philip's War -- a one-year fight between Indians and English settlers that killed an estimated 600 settlers and 3,000 Indians, said Frederick Meli, an anthropologist who has studied New England American Indian ceremonial sites for 20 years.

The war, the bloodiest conflict of 17th century New England, broke down Indian resistance and led to the westward push by Europeans. "The war here decided who was going to run this country," said Greene, gesturing toward the Nipsachuck woods.

ARCHEOLOGICAL SURVEY

Meli, a former University of Rhode Island professor who works with the local Conservation Commission, estimates the area could contain a burial ground spanning at least 230 acres. Already, the Wampanoags call it their version of Arlington National Cemetery, where U.S. soldiers are buried.

"There's lots of ceremonial stonework there," said Meli.

The local Conservation Commission is applying for a grant to help pay for an archeological survey of two plots of land owned by a family that borders the area slated for development. They will meet town officials on Monday to propose a survey.

They would dig the area, scan it for metal and possibly excavate it, said Meli. If the findings suggests a burial ground, the tribe would then use that as evidence for a case to try to block Narragansett Improvement's housing project, arguing their land could also contain ancient Indian remains.

State authorities are watching the process.

"What we do know is that it's an important area to a number of Indian tribes. Maybe the piles are related to that (tribal history). Maybe they aren't," said Paul Robinson, Rhode Island's state archeologist.

William Simmons, chair of Brown University's anthropology department, said the stone mounds were mysterious but could just as easily have been arranged by European settlers.

"Placing the rocks like that could have been a practical solution for farmers clearing fields or meadows or pastures or whatever they were clearing -- to get rocks out of the way by piling them atop one another," he said

"If you were to dig and find human remains then you would know for sure," he said.

    Piles of rocks spark an American Indian mystery, R, 18.5.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1625947520070518

Tribes seek aid

as Jamestown marks 400th year

Sat May 12, 2007
9:14AM EDT
Reuters
By David Alexander

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For most U.S. citizens the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in America is a time to celebrate pioneers who crossed the ocean in sailing ships and braved hardships to forge a nation.

But for American Indians whose ancestors lived in America when the English adventurers slogged ashore on Jamestown Peninsula in what is now Virginia, it is at once a reminder of their long struggle to overcome persecution and prejudice and a chance to reintroduce themselves to the world.

"We're celebrating 400 years of survival in a fairly hostile environment," said Anne Richardson, chief of the Rappahannock, one of several Powhatan tribes involved in the commemoration events this month that included a visit by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II.

The struggle is not over. The last time the queen visited Jamestown, 50 years ago on the 350th anniversary, it was illegal in Virginia to register as an Indian, and violators faced up to a year in prison.

Even today, the state's Powhatan tribes -- the descendants of the people who helped the first English settlers survive -- are not officially recognized by the federal government, a move that would make their 3,175 members eligible to receive aid available to other Indians.

A measure recognizing six Virginia tribes -- the Rappahannock, Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy, Upper Mattaponi, Nansemond and Monacan -- passed the U.S. House of Representatives this week. But it has yet to clear the Senate and must be signed by the president.

Five of the tribes are Powhatan. The sixth, the Monacan, had contact with the English in 1608.

Given the history of discrimination, the groups might have been justified in skipping Jamestown events, including the queen's tour last week and a visit by U.S. President George W. Bush this weekend. But Richardson said the tribes decided two years ago to participate.

"We saw an opportunity with the 400th anniversary to get the truth out about our history instead of that colonialized version that the world now knows," she said.

BEYOND POCAHONTAS

Many people know the story of the Jamestown settlers and how they were helped by Chief Powhatan and his daughter, Pocahontas. Disney spun the tale into an animated Hollywood movie, but much of the tribes' interaction with Europeans would not make suitable viewing for children.

The influx of Europeans following the success of the 1607 Jamestown settlement brought the sides into conflict. After a second war with the English, the Indians signed the 1677 Treaty of Middle Plantation with Charles II, which is still observed annually when tribes pay a tribute to the state governor.

"It's the oldest Indian treaty in existence today," Democratic Rep. James Moran of Virginia told a House debate.

By the 1700s the tribes had lost most of their land. They became increasingly marginalized over the years, but some of the worst persecution came in the 20th century.

Virginia adopted a racial law in 1924 that required all citizens to be registered at birth as either white or "colored."

"This law allowed the Commonwealth of Virginia to destroy the documents that proved the existence of these Native American families," Moran said.

A white supremacist who headed the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics used the law to systematically alter records to identify tribe members as "colored" instead of Indian.

"We could not get medical care for our people during that time, we could not get educated during that time, we could not get jobs during that time," Richardson said.

The discrimination lasted more than 40 years and did not end until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of the law in 1967 and the state repealed the remainder in the 1970s.

Since then, the Virginia tribes have begun to reclaim their heritage. Many won state recognition in the 1980s, but most had little chance of winning federal status through the Bureau of Indian Affairs because their records had been destroyed.

For seven years they have sought recognition by an act of Congress. The measure that passed the House on Tuesday could bring as much as $8 million in assistance annually, but it would also be an acknowledgment of their history and culture.

History and culture are something the tribes have tried to highlight with their participation in the Jamestown commemoration.

"It was the opportunity to raise our profile, to make people more aware of who we are," said Wayne Adkins, second assistant chief of the Chickahominy and leader of the federal recognition effort. "Many people don't realize there are tribes still in Virginia."

    Tribes seek aid as Jamestown marks 400th year, R, 12.5.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1142725920070512

A way of life is found in translation

28.3.2007
USA TODAY
By Judy Keen

PRAIRIE ISLAND INDIAN RESERVATION, Minn. — A few years ago, Wayne Wells' grandmother asked him in her native Dakota if he was going to town. "It took me a year and a half to understand what she was asking and to answer her," he says.

During that time, Wells, 32, learned Dakota while he was a student at the University of Minnesota. Now, with the help of a high-tech translating device developed for military use in Iraq and Afghanistan, he's teaching the language to other members of his Mdewakanton Sioux tribe who live on the reservation southeast of St. Paul.

Troops at checkpoints in Iraq and Afghanistan, medics and other U.S. forces use the Phraselator P2 to communicate. It was first used by the military in late 2001 in Afghanistan. Now the paperback-size translator is being used by about 55 Indian tribes in the USA to preserve their languages.

What began here three years ago as a weekly potluck dinner followed by Dakota lessons has grown into a program with three classes taught by Wells, who works for the Prairie Island Indian Community. There's a beginners class on Tuesdays, a Wednesday noon class for adults and another on Wednesday evenings for intermediate students. Dozens of the 711 tribe members who live on the reservation are taking classes.

Interest piqued

The language was on the verge of extinction until Wells and tribal treasurer Alan Childs wrote a proposal for the tribal council to fund language training on the reservation. Only four men, tribal elders who grew up speaking Dakota, were fluent. "The Dakota way of life is in the language," Wells says. "We couldn't lose it."

Kachina Yeager, 12, is an intermediate student, and her mom, Shelley Buck-Yeager, is in the adult class. "We all ask questions to each other in class and go around in a circle," Kachina says. She also enjoys playing Scrabble on a custom-made board in Dakota.

Kachina has used the Phraselator a few times. "It was fun but sort of confusing," she says. Still, she's learning. She and her mom use Dakota phrases at home, Kachina says: "Every now and then she'll say something like 'hurry up' in Dakota."

Interest in language lessons picked up after the prosperous tribe, which operates the Treasure Island Resort & Casino here, bought five Phraselators this year. The handheld devices cost about $3,300 each and can be programmed with thousands of Dakota phrases. Users speak a phrase in English or use a menu to find the phrase they want, then the machine plays it in Dakota.

The Phraselator was developed by Voxtec International for use by U.S. troops, says John Hall, president of the company in Annapolis, Md. About 5,000 are being used by U.S. forces now, he says.

"We started research and development with military applications, but very early on we realized that there were a lot of markets that had this need," Hall says. The Phraselator also is being used by U.S. law enforcement departments, emergency medical teams and construction companies, he says.

Don Thornton, who is half Cherokee and president of Thornton Media in Banning, Calif., markets the device to Indian tribes in the USA and Canada to preserve their languages. One California tribe bought Phraselators for every member, he says. "We see this as a way for a tribe to control its own destiny," Thornton says.

Curtis Campbell, 71, sits on a recliner in his living room, wearing a headset with a microphone that's linked to a laptop operated by Wells. Campbell is one of three tribal elders recording phrases in their native language for use in the Phraselator. Wells will later download Campbell's words into the device.

Wells reads a phrase in English, then says, "Ready, one, two, three." Campbell repeats the phrase in Dakota. Some of Campbell's responses — to fragments such as "I know it" and "from over there" — are quite short, but others require a lot of words.

When Wells asks Campbell to translate "the University of Minnesota," the elder says what sounds like a full sentence in Dakota: "In this land they now call Minnesota, there's a place for higher learning."

There's a debate when Wells asks Campbell, a retired construction worker, to translate "student."

"There are several ways to address that," Campbell says. He could say "boys and girls that are attending school" or "that person seeking knowledge. … Females or males? How many? What are they learning?" He shrugs. "I don't think there's one word that covers it all," he says.

Dakota, which for centuries was a spoken language only, was first written by missionaries in the 1840s. The language includes no profanities or insults, Campbell says, and is more descriptive than English. "It's more expressive," he says. "You have words that are deeper in emotions."

In Dakota, Monday is "this is the first day." Since Christians came to Indian country, the Dakota word for Sunday is "sacred day." The Dakota phrase for Saturday is "the day to wash your clothes and floors."

When Wells suggests that Campbell use a translation that's in his class plan, Campbell says, "Throw those books away."

Appreciation grows

The resurgence of Dakota on the Prairie Island reservation has been accompanied by appreciation for other facets of tribal culture.

Childs began conducting singing and drum classes for boys to coincide with Tuesday language class, which attracted mostly girls. Then a tribe member volunteered to teach a course on traditional cooking. Next came a beading class.

There's newfound respect for the art of storytelling and discussion about recording the tales that were passed down to the elders. Childs hopes to arrange classes for a sign language that was once understood by all U.S. tribes.

Wells and Childs eventually want to send Phraselators home to help families learn their language. His grandchildren, Childs says, could start learning as infants and, in turn, pass it along to their children.

Knowing Dakota, Childs says, instills "self-esteem and pride" in the tribe's young members. "And identity," Wells adds.

    A way of life is found in translation, UT, 28.3.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-28-dakota-language_N.htm

In Arizona Desert,

Indian Trackers vs. Smugglers

March 7, 2007
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION, Ariz. — A fresh footprint in the dirt, fibers in the mesquite. Harold Thompson reads the signs like a map.

They point to drug smugglers, 10 or 11, crossing from Mexico. The deep impressions and spacing are a giveaway to the heavy loads on their backs. With no insect tracks or paw prints of nocturnal creatures marking the steps, Mr. Thompson determines the smugglers probably crossed a few hours ago.

“These guys are not far ahead; we’ll get them,” said Mr. Thompson, 50, a strapping Navajo who follows the trail like a bloodhound.

At a time when all manner of high technology is arriving to help beef up security at the Mexican border — infrared cameras, sensors, unmanned drones — there is a growing appreciation among the federal authorities for the American Indian art of tracking, honed over generations by ancestors hunting animals.

Mr. Thompson belongs to the Shadow Wolves, a federal law enforcement unit of Indian officers that has operated since the early 1970s on this vast Indian nation straddling the Mexican border.

Tracking skills are in such demand that the Departments of State and Defense have arranged for the Shadow Wolves to train border guards in other countries, including some central to the fight against terrorism. Several officers are going to train border police in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, which border Afghanistan, and in several other countries.

In the renewed push to secure the border with Mexico, the curbing of narcotics trafficking often gets less public attention than the capturing of illegal immigrants.

But the 15-member Shadow Wolves unit, part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is recruiting members to reach the congressionally authorized complement of 21. And the immigration agency is considering forming a sister unit to patrol part of the Canadian border at the Blackfeet reservation in Montana, where concern about drug trafficking is growing.

“Detecting is one thing, and apprehending is something entirely different,” said Rodney Irby, a special agent in Tucson for the immigration agency who helps supervise the Shadow Wolves. “I applaud the technology; it will only make the border more secure. But there are still going to be groups of people who penetrate the most modern technology, and we need a cadre of agents and officers to apprehend them.”

The Shadow Wolves have seized nearly 30,000 pounds of illegal drugs since October, putting them on pace to meet or exceed previous annual seizure amounts. They routinely seize some 100,000 pounds of illegal drugs a year, Mr. Irby said.

They home in on drug smugglers, who use less-traveled cattle tracks, old wagon-wheel trails and barely formed footpaths to ferry their loads to roads and highways about 40 miles from the border.

The Tohono land, which is the size of Connecticut and the third-largest reservation in area in the country, has long vexed law enforcement. Scores of people die crossing here every year in the searing, dry heat of summer or the frigid cold of winter. And its 76-mile-long border with Mexico, marked in most places with a three- or four-strand barbed-wire fence that is easy to breach, is a major transshipment point for marijuana, Mexico’s largest illicit crop.

Adding to the challenge is that drug smugglers have enlisted tribal members or forced them into cooperation, sometimes stashing their loads in the ramshackle houses dotting the landscape or paying the young to act as guides. Several tribal members live on the Mexican side, and those on the American side have long freely crossed the border, which they usually do through a few informal entry points that drug traffickers, too, have picked up on.

How much the Shadow Wolves disrupt the criminal organizations is debated. Officials said they believed the group’s work at least complicated drug smuggling operations — the Shadow Wolves have received death threats over the years — but they said they could not estimate the amount of drugs making it through.

Marvin Eleando, a Tohono who retired from the unit in 2004, said he believed the Shadow Wolves got just a small fraction of the drugs moving through the Tohono lands. Mr. Eleando estimated it would take about 100 Shadow Wolves to truly foil the smugglers, who employ spotters on mountaintops who watch for officers and then shift routes accordingly.

Still, he said, the unit must keep up the effort because the drugs, and the gun violence often associated with trafficking, imperil tribal members.

“The kids get mixed up in this and then don’t want to work anymore,” Mr. Eleando said.

Lately, according to the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, drug seizures in Arizona, and especially around the reservation and the Tucson area, have surged, and the size of the loads found has increased.

Officials said it was too soon to tell whether the uptick signaled a long-term pattern. But they believed it could be partly explained by the additional staffing on the border. Law enforcement officials said that there also appeared to be a bumper crop of marijuana in Mexico and that smugglers seemed to be trying to ship tons of it ahead of government crackdowns there.

“We never know how much is being pushed in our direction,” said David V. Aguilar, the chief of the Border Patrol, though he added that it seemed the amount was “higher at this point.”

Alonzo Peña, the agent in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Arizona, said investigators had many theories but little concrete information to explain the increase in trafficking.

“Is this marijuana that has been sitting in warehouses, and they are trying to get rid of it now that there is a strong hand in Mexico?” Mr. Peña said. “We just don’t know other than that we are seeing more loads and bigger loads in many areas.”

The Shadow Wolves, established with a handful of officers in 1972 as part of what was then the United States Customs Service, were the first federal law enforcement officers allowed on Tohono land.

The federal government agreed to the Tohono O’odham Nation’s demand that the officers have American Indian ancestry, a requirement still in place. Members are at least one-quarter Indian, and the current group represents seven tribes, including the Tohono.

While other law enforcement agencies, including the Border Patrol, use tracking, the Shadow Wolves believe that their experience and their Indian ancestry give them an edge, particularly here.

“I speak the language, so when we are dealing with elderly members in particular I can make them more comfortable,” said Gary Ortega, a Tohono who has been in the Shadow Wolves for nine years. “They are willing to tell us things they know or see that they may not tell another federal agent or officer.”

There is also, of course, the thrill of the hunt.

On a recent day, Mr. Thompson picked up the track around 3 a.m. and, with Mr. Ortega, stayed on it for nearly 12 hours through thorny thickets and wide-open desert. As the terrain grew craggy, Mr. Thompson kept a brisk pace, with Mr. Ortega and other officers leapfrogging ahead to help find the trail.

“Every chase is just a little different,” Mr. Ortega said, barely pausing as he followed the prints in the sand.

It grew easier as the sun rose and the smugglers kept bumping into thorny bushes and stopping to rest, leaving their food wrappers behind and coat fibers in the cat-claw brush. By midafternoon, Mr. Ortega and Mr. Thompson were tiring, too. But the scent of the men’s burlap sacks perked up Mr. Ortega, and he quickened his pace, finally catching sight of the smugglers and prompting them to bolt from their resting spot.

Left behind were 10 bales of marijuana, 630 pounds in total, a fairly typical bust, with a street value of more than $315,000.

With the weight off their backs, the smugglers showed new speed dashing to hiding places and easily outmatched their pursuers. Other Shadow Wolves drove out to pick up the load, finding their colleagues resting on the bales and grinning in satisfaction.

“When we get the dope or the guys,” Mr. Thompson said, “that’s when it ends.”

    In Arizona Desert, Indian Trackers vs. Smugglers, NYT, 7.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/washington/07wolves.html?hp

Past and future collide

in fight over Cherokee identity

Updated 2/10/2007 4:35 PM ET
By Adam Geller, Associated Press
USA Today

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — When Lucy Allen sets out to tell her family's story, she first finds an empty room with plenty of open table space.

Others, she knows, illustrate their ancestral legends by passing around a single prized photograph or diagram of the family tree. But Allen arrives wheeling two big black suitcases, each stuffed with enough supporting evidence to do Perry Mason proud.

"This is my father," she begins, and directs long, thin fingers to a vintage oval-framed photograph swaddled in a towel.

A long time ago, the man in the picture told his little girl she was born of Indians. They were Cherokees, he said, proud people, descended from a regal line.

The girl loved those stories. But it wasn't until she had children of her own, that Allen realized the tales might have dimensions she'd never considered. And years later, a long-forgotten document proved her suspicions right.

It was just as her parents told her. Yes, she was black. But there was Cherokee in her veins, too.

There was a catch, though, and it was bound to persist no matter how clear the evidence might seem to Allen.

She could call herself an Indian. She and others like her could argue that, Indian blood or not, they had as much right to the Cherokee Nation's identity as anyone else.

But Allen's "proof" could just as easily be cited to show her people were not real Cherokees at all, but a human burden a defeated tribe had been forced to shoulder.

A century past, Allen's ancestors had secured what they thought was a permanent place in the tribe. Now, though, it was clear the only way she could ever be acknowledged as Cherokee would be to take on the very Cherokees who refused to count her as one of their own.

Cherokee owned slaves

This begins as one woman's story, but it is much more. It is the story of identity. Who are we? Who decides who we are?

Each September, a crowd gathers under the shade trees surrounding the weathered brick of the old Cherokee Capitol, to celebrate the remarkably resilient identity of the nation's largest Indian tribe.

It is a pride-filled afternoon, with speeches, and songs performed in Cherokee by a children's choir.

But as they celebrate their identity, Cherokees acknowledge the brutal history of efforts to extinguish it.

"We stand here today on the shoulders of our ancestors, who endured the Trail of Tears and brought us to this place we call home," a speaker told the crowd last fall in Tahlequah.

And yet while Cherokees are proud of their journey, there is one chapter most aren't taught.

Long ago, as Cherokees struggled to remain independent of a white government, they were masters of black slaves.

Cherokees and other tribes brought slaves with them, when the federal government forced them to leave the Southeast and march to the Indian Territory that would become Oklahoma. After the tribe backed the losing side in the Civil War, the government demanded Cherokees free slaves and make them citizens of the Cherokee Nation.

The people, dubbed freedmen, embraced citizenship. They voted in tribal elections and ran for office. They served on the tribal council. They started businesses and became teachers in schools for freedmen children.

What's difficult to know is how much — before and after slavery ended — the lives of Cherokees and blacks intertwined and the lines between them blurred.

In the last 20 years, modern-day freedmen — descended from former slaves, free blacks, and others — have tried to reclaim citizenship. The resulting conflict provokes charges and countercharges that racism, greed and dirty politics are all at play.

"Do you want non-Indians...using your Health Care Dollars?" warned an e-mail circulated last summer by backers of a vote on citizenship. "...getting your Cherokee Nation scholarship dollars?...making your Housing wait list longer?...being made Indians?"

Now, the vote on citizenship is set — for March 3.

As they consider their decision, Cherokees have reason to be suspicious. The federal government pays about three-quarters of the tribal government's $350 million annual budget. But thanks to casinos, Cherokees' power to generate wealth and provide benefits is increasing.

Meanwhile, dozens of groups of self-described lost Cherokees have popped up, some claiming a right to recognition.

But Chad Smith, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, says his tribe's conflict over citizenship — similar to those confronting a number of tribes — is not about politics or race.

"It's just a fundamental right of sovereignty...to not only determine your own future, but to determine your own identity," he says.

The conflict, though, has drawn scrutiny to a part of history some Cherokees would just as soon have set aside.

Circe Sturm, a University of Oklahoma professor, recalls how Cherokees tried to dissuade her when she began studying the issue a decade ago.

"I think for some people it was sort of a shame about that being part of history," she says. "There was a kind of discomfort attached to it in many ways. It was like we've dealt with it and it's over."

Well, maybe to some it was over.

But that was a notion Lucy Allen and many others just couldn't abide.

Transcript found

After 20 years spent raising a family and following her husband in his Army career, Lucy Allen discovered the blessing of time.

Before long, she was spending hours in historical archives, prospecting for clues to back up her family's oft-told mythology.

"Once you start on this, if you get something, you're hooked," she says.

Oh, was she ever.

Allen, now 74 and the widow of a career Army man, quickly found her ancestors on Cherokee citizenship rolls from the early 1900s. The lists were compiled by the Dawes Commission — set up by a Congress bent on breaking up Indians' collective lands and parceling them out to tribal citizens. Many Indians were soon swindled out of their land, or lost it to financial hardship.

The Commission, though, drew up two rolls. One listed Cherokees by blood. The other, where Allen's ancestors were listed, was for freedmen — a roll of blacks, regardless of whether they had Indian blood.

Then, in the early 1990s, nearly two decades after beginning her search, a manila envelope from the National Archives arrived in Allen's Tulsa mailbox. Papers inside offered a window back to a long forgotten afternoon.

On that Thursday in 1901, a black farmer named William Martin — Allen's great grandfather — headed for the colony of tents pitched by the Dawes Commission along a creek two miles outside his hometown.

"How old would you be?" a mustachioed white official asked Martin, when he reached the tribunal's table.

"Something over 40, I judge," replied Martin, son of a freed slave woman. She, too, was questioned.

"What is your father's name?"

"Joe Martin."

... "Was Joe Martin an Indian and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation?" the questioner asked Martin's mother.

"Yes sir."

The aged transcript was the link, Allen says, connecting her to Capt. Joseph L. Martin, a Confederate officer and Cherokee lord of a legendary 100,000-acre ranch.

He owned 103 black slaves. And one, it seemed, had born him a son — Allen's great grandfather.

As Allen studied the documents it became clear, "I'm more than my Dad ever told me. They're telling me his (William Martin's) daddy was a chief. Oh yeah, I'm sticking my chest out, because I'm pretty proud."

Indian lineage Allen unearthed on her father's side was at least as rich.

But since the early 1980s, her request for a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood — issued only to those who can prove a link to someone on the comission's "by blood" rolls — has been rejected eight times, Allen says.

Rejection stings, she says, and others agree.

Around Ruth Adair Nash's dining table in Bartlesville, discussion quickly fans indignation. Nash and brother Everett Adair say their genealogical sleuthing has turned up clear evidence that they are descendants of Cherokees.

So Nash bridles at the suggestion that she claims blood just to get tribal benefits. Sure, they want access to benefits, she says. They are determined to have them precisely because the Cherokee Nation has continually denied them, she says.

"They don't want this to be true," Nash says, waving copies of genealogical records.

"It's because we're black. And when you're black — get back!"

Johnny Toomer, a forklift driver in Muskogee, sees it a little differently, his view framed by working alongside Cherokees. They look at his high cheekbones and dark eyes set against mocha skin, and tell him he must be right.

"Johnny," they say, "you can see the Indian in you!"

"Well," Toomer answers, "seeing it and proving it is quite a different thing."

Court weighs in

Allen continued digging.

It took her to a meeting of freedmen descendants in 2003, where a man named David Cornsilk rose to speak.

Cornsilk, 6-foot-2 and green-eyed, jokes that he's often mistaken for white, though he is Cherokee by blood. He worked years ago in the Cherokee Nation office that registers citizens and now is a store manager. But as an unpaid "lay advocate," he's poured himself into battling for freedmen descendants, convinced his tribe must honor its commitments.

When Allen approached, Cornsilk had recently lost a case in the Cherokee Nation's top court — which resolves disagreements over tribal law — on behalf of another woman seeking citizenship. It was the latest in a series of court setbacks for freedmen, dating to the 1980s.

Still, when "Lucy walked up to me and said, 'What can I do?'," Cornsilk recalls, "I said, well, let's sue them."

Lucy Allen v. Cherokee Nation Tribal Council, filed in 2004, asked the court to strike down a law making citizenship contingent on "proof of Cherokee blood."

The issue, as framed by Cornsilk, was even older than the old Cherokee Capitol, where the judges heard the case.

"We as a people must look back to where we have been to know where we are today," Cornsilk argued.

"I apologize to you for being emotional about it. It's not my ego, it's my heart. It's what's been done in the name of David Cornsilk and all of the Cherokee people to these Cherokee people."

But tribal lawyers argued that Cherokees — who approved a Constitution in 1975 reserving membership for "citizens as proven by reference to the Dawes Commission Rolls" — had already made clear freedmen should not be counted among them.

"It's not unreasonable to require someone to be Cherokee to be a citizen of the Cherokee Nation," Richard Osburn, an attorney for the tribe, told the court.

Seven months later, a divided court issued its ruling.

"If the Freedmen's citizenship rights existed on the very night before the 1975 Constitution was approved, then they must necessarily survive today," Justice Stacy Leeds wrote for the 2-1 majority, last March. "The Cherokee Nation is much more than just a group of families with a common ancestry."

Allen, celebrating the answer she'd been waiting for, drove with her sons to Tahlequah to register as new citizens.

But the court's decision alarmed many others.

"It really shook me up," says John Ketcher, a respected former deputy chief. "We're not just going to sit here and twiddle our thumbs and let it happen."

To Ketcher and others, the freedmen's quest for citizenship looks like a cash-grab — for tribal health care benefits, scholarships and other perks — by people who have little true interest in the Cherokees. Growing up in Indian country, speaking Cherokee as his first language, Ketcher says he never saw a black person until he was 10, leaving him skeptical that freedmen descendants are part of the Cherokee community.

"I think they want some of the goodies that are coming our way," he says.

Many Cherokees share that sentiment, says Cara Cowan Watts, a tribal councilwoman.

"A lot of our citizens, they never ask for anything from the tribe, so they see that as a personal affront," Cowan Watts says.

"I didn't hear of freedmen until this whole issue came up," she says. "I didn't hear of them or meet them."

Tribal officials reject criticism that the controversy stems from racism.

Cherokees are one of the most racially tolerant Indian tribes, "and being portrayed as something else...is hurtful," says Mike Miller, a spokesmen for the tribe.

After the Allen ruling, critics collected more than 3,000 signatures demanding that Cherokee voters be allowed to decide. Smith, the chief, has called a vote for March 3.

Earlier this month, a group of freedmen asked a federal judge to stop the vote from taking place. The court's response to that request — part of an ongoing lawsuit by freedmen challenging the last tribal election because they were excluded from voting — will be closely watched.

If the referendum goes ahead, conventional wisdom is that, even with more than 1,500 new freedmen voters registered, they will be denied citizenship again.

But the issue's complexity is evident in talk over cornbread and ham at a meeting of the Victory Cherokee Organization, a community group gathered above a storefront church in Collinsville. Chairman Danny Stanley calls the issue settled, saying members are "pretty much 100%" against having freedmen in the tribe.

Some, though, say it isn't that simple.

If freedmen are barred from citizenship, what's to say that people won't next try to bar those with limited Cherokee blood, Jewel Hendrix wonders. Her sister, Mary Burr, agrees.

"I feel like you are (Cherokee) because you feel it in your heart, " Burr says. "You know that you are."

Blood vs. culture

So what makes a Cherokee?

Is it blood?

While some freedmen descendants surely have Indian blood, the majority probably don't, says Daniel Littlefield Jr. of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and author of a book, "The Cherokee Freedmen."

But, Littlefield says, blood should not matter.

Cherokees — who also count Shawnee and Delaware Indians and adopted whites as citizens — continued adopting blacks as citizens well after a treaty required it, making it hard to argue they were unwanted, he says. Once free to participate, there is ample evidence that black freedmen did just that.

Is being Cherokee about sharing a culture?

Long before the Civil War, Cherokee masters and black slaves crafted relationships that confounded stereotypes, says Tia Miles, a professor at the University of Michigan. Her book Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery examines those incongruities.

Cherokees and blacks prayed side-by-side. Slaves were teachers to Cherokee children. They danced together, staged races together. They spent so much time together, that it frustrated white missionaries bent on keeping them apart, Miles says.

Did Cherokees and blacks regard each other as family, friends, lovers? It's hard to know with certainty.

"Yes, there was a line between who was enslaved and who was free and there was a line between who was Cherokee and who was black and who was white," Miles says. "And yet, Cherokee people were much more willing to bend that line than white slaveholders were in the South, and to cross that line."

It's mostly over the last 100 years, after Jim Crow laws tried to separate races, that the intertwining of Cherokee and black unraveled, she says.

Today, one of the most striking things about Indian country is the faces.

Some prominent Cherokees of the past were products of intermarriage, and now a fair number of those who count themselves as Cherokee have fair skin or blue eyes or blonde hair — and limited Indian blood.

Just 6,000 of the Cherokee Nation's 260,000 citizens speak Cherokee. If the language goes, John Ketcher worries what will become of his tribe. Still, he allows, there's long been something about being Cherokee that's defies quantifying.

On a drive out of town, he points the way down a country road and past an old one-room schoolhouse. Just beyond, a largely forgotten cemetery tops a bluff. There rests John Ross, a legendary chief. He'd almost certainly be against granting citizenship to those without blood, Ketcher says.

That is despite the fact that Ross was just 1/8 Cherokee.

"Even though he was very little Cherokee, he was more a full-blood then some of our full-bloods," Ketcher says, with a sigh. "I think it's probably what's in the heart, eventually, you know."

Decision awaited

The Cherokee Nation — most of its land gone and its people spread across thousands of miles — has rebuilt itself, in part, by redefining itself.

"We basically have changed from a nation of territory to a nation of people," says Smith, the chief.

Now the Nation will decide which people belong.

But freedmen descendants, prepared for the prospect that their newly won citizenship could be revoked, say history has already made that decision and they will accept no other.

If Cherokees reject her, Allen says she'll go back in court.

"I'm not quitting. I'm still in for the fight," she says.

"We might not ever see anything. But we're looking out for our children now — and they wouldn't know where to begin."

Past and future collide in fight over Cherokee identity, UT, 11.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-10-cherokeefight_x.htm