Native actors go beyond Westerns to … werewolves?
Well, werewolves, in the case of Taylor Lautner, who stars in “New Moon,” the just-released second movie in the teen hit “Twilight” series. Lautner says he recently discovered Potawatomi and Ottawa roots; what’s more important, according to this opinion piece in the Wichita Eagle-Beacon, is that director Chris Weitz insisted on using actors of Native descent for the “Wolf Pack.” Spencer is Lakota (Sioux), Meraz is Purepecha (Tarasco), Gordon is Hualapai and Pelletier is Cree-Metis. The piece is by Rod Pocowatchit is from the Pawnee, Comanche and Shawnee tribes.

Indians back on Alcatraz Island after 40 years
Four decades after Indian people occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay – in part to call attention to the woeful treatment of the nation’s tribes – they were back. Yesterday, according to this San Francisco Chronicle story, some of the initial occupiers, as well as others, returned with the government’s blessing. Now, says Howard Levitt, chief of education for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, “the occupation is considered to be a milestone in the self-determination and civil rights movements. We honor that.”

“Fried bread, sweat lodges and Nintendo Wii”
That headline in the Sioux City Journal grabbed us. What the heck was it all about? Turns out to be this story about students at the Augustine Indian Mission School on the Winnebago Indian Reservation south of in Sioux City, Iowa. They were talking about how they’d celebrate Thanksgiving.

Tribes see loss of oil, natural gas royaltiess
Here’s a worrisome Bloomberg News story that says: “plunging oil and natural gas prices and a drop in revenue from lease sales cut the money sent by the United States to tribes, states and the Treasury Department by more than half in fiscal 2009. “Lower energy prices drove down royalties and sapped industry demand for leases,” it says.

Flathead Reservation resident is barrel racing champ
McK’la Gonzalez, a 15-year-old barrel racer from Elmo on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, took first place in National Barrel Horse Association Montana State Championships, youth category, in Great Falls last month, the Char-Koosta News reports here. Her aunt, Bernadine Tenas, says Gonzalez has been barrel racing since she was seven and has three championships buckles. She now qualifies for the World NBHA championships.

Gwen Florio

It’s a pretty simple equation: Kids who read – or are read to – early and often do better in school. But that can be hard to achieve in far-flung tribal communities, where poverty and geography conspire against it.

Enter – at least in Montana – the StoryMakers program, which puts children’s books in the hands of families in both reservations and rural communities.

“Buying books for your children in today’s economy, when people are struggling to keep the lights on, their houses warm, buy food … this gives them the opportunity to have something they can share with their child,” says Jeanne Christopher, director of Early Childhood Services for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes on Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation.

As the Missoulian’s Vince Devlin tells it, here, Christopher is part of several “citizen teams” StoryMakers use to get a new slew of books in the hands of an average of 6,000 children in Montana every six months.

For more information on the StoryMakers program on the Flathead Indian Reservation, contact Jeanne Christopher or Malissa Morigeau at (406) 676-4509.

Gwen Florio

Navajo Nation in “turmoil” as president placed on leave
Good investigative reporting by the Navajo Times results in publication of this information showing “substantial evidence” that Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr. violated the tribe’s ethics laws. Tensions are so high that a significant, armed police presence was deemed necessary during last week’s special tribal council meeting in Window Rock. The video above gives an idea of the atmosphere that day.

Canada’s First Nations reserves see “explosion” of tuberculosis
The Winnipeg Free Press reports here that “Manitoba now has one of the highest rates of TB in Canada because the disease has been allowed to spread rampant in the First Nations population. On some reserves, the TB rate is more than 100 times the national average.”

Ho-Chunk buy land where Chippewa had planned casino
There’s been considerable buzz about this story, mainly because the Bad River and St.Croix Chippewa bands had options to buy a parcel of land near Beloit, Wisc., for an off-reservation casino. On Thursday, the Ho-Chunk Nation announced it had purchased that same parcel. The two Chippewa bands wanted to build a casino there, but the Ho-Chunk say they stand a better chance of getting approval to build a casino off their reservation.

Turkey sponsors Native American education exchange
The Web site TurkishNY.com makes its first appearance in Buffalo Post with this story about a lecture tour in Turkey this month by Native American educators. The Turkish Coaltion of America is sponsoring the trip in conjunction with the American Indian Higher Educational Consortium. The story says the idea is to foster collaboration between tribal colleges and Turkish universities.

Powwow celebrates couple’s 63rd wedding anniversary
Here’s the sort of story we love to see: Victor Matt met Delma Gebeau at the Arlee powwow on Flathead Indian Reservation shortly after he came back to Montana after World War II. The Salish couple have been married 63 years, and celebrated their union the way it began – with a powwow, according to the Char-Koosta News.

Gwen Florio

Clover Anaquod was shopping for Halloween with her son this week when he gasped and pointed to a display.

Headdresses. Tomahawks. Peace pipes.

Anaquod, who is Assiniboine Sioux from the Fort Peck Reservation in northeastern Montana, tells the Missoulian that she was taken aback.

“Native American regalia is not a costume,” said Anaquod. “I took it personal.”

As for 10-year-old Matthew, “he was shocked. It hurt his feelings to see these.

Confederated Salish and Kootenai elder Tony Incashola says Indian costumes on Halloween make people view Native Americans “more as a display than humans.”

On the plus side, said Incashola, it seems as though fewer people these days tend to sashay out on Halloween in feathers and paint.

“They feel it’s time to move on, that those days are gone,” he said. “Gradually, more and more people are starting to understand the feeling.”

Gwen Florio

Montana’s newly enacted smoking ban for bars has proved a boon to the state’s reservations, whose casinos and other businesses are exempt from the ban.

That’s raised the ire of non-tribal bar owners on the Flathead Reservation, who say the competition is killing them.

Rick Wheeler owns The Club in Ronan, on the western Montana reservation. His bar is just a block away from the Pheasant Lounge. That’s owned by Lori Peterson, an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

People can still smoke in The Club. But not, technically, in the Pheasant Lounge. Missoulian reporter Vince Devlin explains that technicality here.

Basically, Wheeler is allowing his patrons to light up in defiance of the law.

Otherwise, Wheeler says, he’ll lose the estimated 90 percent of his customers who smoke and “that’s not right. This bar is my retirement – do they want to take that away form me, too? It’s racial discrimination.”

Both Wheeler and Peterson tell Devlin that bar owners on the reservation who enforce the smoke ban have seen their businesses drop by as much as $1,000.

Gwen Florio

Where are the Indians in Black Hills bison roundup?
Tim Giago’s column here in the Native Sun News addresses something we wondered about when we read this Rapid City Journal story about lat month’s bison roundup in Custer State Park in South Dakota. Something seemed missing. Giago addresses that something.

And speaking of bison roundups …
The one last week at the National Bison Range on western Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation went off without a hitch, the Char-Koosta News reports here. Crowds were down from previous years, but that’s probably because the temperature took a precipitous dive last week.

Indigenous communities around the world face extra H1N1 flu threat
People on Indian reservations in the United States and on Canada’s reserves aren’t the only ones being hit extra-hard by swine flu. (See previous posts here and here.) Australia’s aboriginal people and Peru’s Matsigenka tribe are among indigenous communities reporting disproportionate numbers of cases of swine flu, according to this story in London’s Sunday Independent.

Piikani Nation asks Shell Canada to hold off on gas drilling
Tribal elders of the Piikani Nation held a prayer ceremony yesterday and performed a traditional offering in the hopes of persuading Shell Canada not to drill at the base of Mount Backes in southern Alberta. The First Nation considers the site sacred, but Shell Canada wants to explore there for sour gas, CTV Calgary reports here.

Gila River Tribe seeks to woo Chicago Cubs for spring training
So reports the Arizona Republic, here. The tribe is offering to build a new training facility if the Cubs do their spring training on the Gila River Reservation, rather than in Mesa. The The Gila River community also tried to land the Arizona Diamondbacks, who eventually opted for a site near Scottsdale on the Salt River-Pima Indian Community.

Gwen Florio

Dixie Trahan Brabender says she was only 12 when Father Augustine Feretti began abusing her in the rectory of the Catholic church in St. Ignatius on western Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation. The betrayal was twofold – when she told her mother of the abuse, she was rebuked.

“She told me that priests wouldn’t do that, that they were good people,” Brabender tells Missoulian reporter Michael Moore, here. “But I see how it happened. This happened to so many kids and we never even told one another about it. We just buried it.”

Brabender knows that other abuse victims, many of whom are only just beginning to tell their stories, decades after the fact, feel the same isolation. So she’s forming a support group where they can talk about their issues without the trappings of a legal case.

Such a case is in motion now, as part of bankruptcy proceedings involving Jesuit priests in the Northwest. Father Feretti, now dead, was a member of that order.

“Everybody’s story is significant, and we’re just trying to provide a way for those people to be heard,” Brabender says. “I’ve had people try to talk on the phone, but they often end up hanging up. It’s just so hard to finally step forward.”

Her group may finally help them realize that someone believes them.

Gwen Florio

For years, members of western Montana’s Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have held annual ceremonies to honor the Lower Flathead River and Flathead Lake. The river honoring ceremony was in the spring; this week, it was the lake’s turn.

Flathead remains one of the cleanest lakes of its size on the planet, and one of the goals of the honoring is to educate young people about why it’s so important to keep it that way, and the things that threaten that status, writes Vince Devlin in this Missoulian story.

This year’s event brought young people from biology classes at Flathead and Glacier high schools in Kalispell, Two Eagle River School in Pablo and schools in Bigfork, Polson and Ronan.

Gwen Florio

A couple of weeks ago, a group representing victims of abusive Jesuits came to the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, and also to the nearby city of Missoula in an effort to publicize the fact that time was running out for those victims to pursue their tormenters in court.

The group, SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests), focused on two priests in question, Father Bernard Harris, who worked at St. Francis Xavier in Missoula in the late 1950s and ’60s, and Father Augustine Feretti, who spent time on the Flathead and Rocky Boy’s Indian reservations. (Both are dead.)

The Jesuits in the Northwest have filed for bankruptcy, mainly because they’ve paid out more than $25 million in abuse claims. A bankruptcy judge recently set a Nov. 30 deadline for any additional victims to make claims.

More than 50 people have come forward since attorneys Tim Kosnoff and John Allison came to Montana to talk about the case, according to this story in today’s Missoulian.

Kosnoff finds that encouraging. “There’s an element to this that will always keep people silent,” he says. “The church has really had the ability to silence people, and it’s very difficult for people to bring up the past like this without someone saying, ‘Hey, why are you dredging all this up?’ It’s always been hard to come forward, so I’m very encouraged to see people telling their stories now.”

He says the bankruptcy process may make it easier way for victims to tell their stories because there won’t be the typical cross-examination that goes on in a civil case.

If you were abused by a Jesuit priest and want to understand your options regarding the bankruptcy, call attorneys Tim Kosnoff and John Allison at 1-888-667-0683.

Gwen Florio