Here’s a lovely story by Vince Devlin of the Missoulian about Julie Cajune and the terrific work she’s doing:

ARLEE – Julie Cajune isn’t sure which is more remarkable – how she came to be awarded a grant from the foundation of cereal magnate W.K. Kellogg, or what she’ll be able to do with it.

The grant, worth $1.4 million, will cover three years, and Cajune will use it to develop some ambitious tribal history materials in a variety of media, including film.

Cajune, currently director of development at Nkwusm, the Salish language school in Arlee, loves to talk about that.

But the fortuitous series of events that led to the grant is almost a story in itself. Much had already happened before Cajune’s phone rang last summer and, out of the blue, and a Kellogg Foundation official urged her to develop a project and apply for a grant:

Howard Zinn had written a book.

Huilan Krenn had moved to the United States. From China.

Joan Melcher had written an article, about Cajune and a Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribal history she had worked on, for Miller-McCune magazine.

Krenn is the key. A relatively new U.S. citizen, she works for the Kellogg Foundation. When she read Melcher’s article about Cajune, a light clicked on.

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Here’s the entire story from the Associated Press:

HELENA (AP) – The Montana Historical Society is scheduling the Smithsonian Institution’s “Native Words, Native Warriors” exhibit to tour the state’s American Indian reservations.

“This is a rare opportunity to honor Montana’s Indian veterans, and all veterans, as well as to honor the important work of retaining native languages,” said Society Director Richard Sims.

The Smithsonian created the exhibit to tell the story of Indian Marines and soldiers who used their coded native languages as a weapon against U.S. enemies.

The Navajo code talkers during World War II have received the most recognition, but the exhibit shows that Native Americans were first enlisted to relay messages in their own languages during World War I.

Marines and soldiers from 16 tribal nations served as code talkers, including the Assiniboine, Sioux, Navajo, Hopi, Cherokee, Chippewa and Cree.

The exhibit also addresses the irony the Indians faced as they transitioned from Indian boarding schools, where they were punished for speaking their native languages, to being honored for using that language as a vital secret weapon in combat.

Montana has the opportunity to bring the exhibit to the state because the historical society is an affiliate of the Smithsonian.

Montana Historical Society Board of Trustees member George Horse Capture of Great Falls initiated the exhibit when he was a Smithsonian curator, and will serve as guest curator of the Montana exhibit.

The historical society plans to launch the exhibit in Helena in April and then take it to the state’s reservations. The society is also working with tribal veterans’ representatives and tribal councils who want to contribute in their own way in honoring and celebrating their warriors during each four-day event.

The society is seeking sponsors to help cover the $35,000 to $40,000 cost for creating and presenting the traveling exhibit.

It’s been more than three decades, but in all that time, no one in Montana has managed to do what Marvin Camel did: Win a world boxing title.

Camel fought in the 1970s and ’80s as a cruiserweight, a class between light heavyweight and heavyweight. Things were different then. Famed boxing promoter Don King saw no problem with letting out an on-mic war whoop when Camel – who is Salish, from Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation – entered the ring in one of his title bouts, Missoulian reporter Vince Devlin writes here.

Thirty years later, Camel still revels in his accomplishments – even if few in the state remember them.

“Anybody can do what I’ve done,” Camel says, “but in reality, nobody has. I often ask myself, ‘Why me? Why was I chosen to be the first cruiserweight champion of the world?’ I come from a town of 1,500 people, Ronan, Montana, and I’ve won two world titles. There are towns, there are states, there are countries with millions of people that have never won a world championship.”

He wants to share his love of the sport with people in his home. Although Camel has retired to Florida, his brother Ken, also a former professional boxer, wants to start a youth boxing club on the reservation.

Marvin Camel wants to help him with that goal.

“Kenny can give them the ups and downs, the ins and outs,” Camel says, “but there’s one little step he’s got to take that he hasn’t, and I have. He can’t teach them to become a world champion, but I can.”

Gwen Florio

World champion Salish boxer brings event home to Flathead Indian Reservation
Former world champion boxer Marvin Camel comes home to the Flathead Indian Reservation Tuesday to talk about how boxing opened doors to him. He was a two-time world champion boxer who won the World Boxing Council and International Boxing Federation Cruiserweight Championships, the Char-Koosta News reports here. The newspaper writes that Camel is Montana’s only world championship boxer, and was named by Sports Illustrated as one of Montana’s top 50 athletes of the 20th century. Videos of his championship matches will be shown on the Flathead Reservation this week.

Report alleges mismanagement of tribal welfare funds
A investigative report by the Palm Springs (Calif.) Desert Sun alleges the 200 members of the Torres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians have seen millions of dollars disappear from a tribal welfare program meant to help them. More than $6 million disappeared in just two years, it says. Read it here.

Seneca Nation billboard calls for defeat of PACT act
The Prevent All Cigarette Trafficking Act would prohibit the U.S. Postal Service from delivering cigarettes and certain other tobacco products, effectively putting Indian-owned mail order tobacco businesses – an industry developed by the Seneca Nation over the past two decades – out of operation, writes Indian Country Today’s Gale Courey Toensing here. A Seneca Nation billboard on Interstate 190 urges people to vote against it.

Reinstated Navajo President Joe Shirley offers options for smaller council
Members of the Navajo Nation voted last month to decrease the size of their tribal council from 88 to 24. Now President Joe Shirley Jr., who recently returned after being placed on leave during a probe into the tribe’s business dealings, has offered 10 reapportionment plans for consideration. The Navajo Times has the story here.

First Nations eager to use new cross-border status cards
Some First Nations in the Yukon are ready to try secure new Indian status cards, but federal officials have chiefs to list concern before before a pilot program begins, the CBC reports here. The idea is that the card will make it easier for First Nations members to cross the Canada-U.S. border. The cards are to be tested in Yukon communities near Alaska.

Little Shell opposition plans election to replace tribal council
Leaders of an opposition faction within Montana’s Little Tribe of Chippewa Indians are planning an election to replace the existing Tribal Council, the Associated Press reports here. The tribe recently was denied federal recognition, but has long been recognized by the state of Montana.

Gwen Florio

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal Council has chosen a new leader, replacing longtime tribal chairman James Steele Jr. with E.T. “Bud” Moran.

“Any member of the council, if they feel up to it, can make a run for it,” Moran, a Vietnam veteran who is halfway through his council term, told Vince Devlin of the Missoulian (Mont.) here. “I felt James is a good man who I have nothing against. I just wanted a chance to serve as chairman.”

Moran says his priorities will include energy and water rights issues.

Meanwhile, Devlin has also learned that Luana K. Ross will head Salish Kootenai College, taking over from Joe McDonald, who built the school from a small satellite institution offering a few junior college credits in borrowed high school classrooms into the most successful tribal college in America.

She’ll take over July 1, he reports here.

Ross, an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, is currently associate professor of Indian studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.
BOCK

She is also co-director of UW’s Native Voices, a graduate program where students, faculty and independent producers create documentaries about indigenous peoples, and author of “Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality.”

In the forward to the 1998 book, which investigated the high rates of imprisonment of American Indians, Ross recalls growing up across the street from the old tribal jail near Dixon in the 1950s, and how almost every family had seen one or more of its members jailed at some point.

“People from my reservation simply seemed to vanish and magically return,” she wrote, including her godfather, a “wonderfully brilliant man” who had trained to be a Jesuit priest, yet had been imprisoned four times in his life.

“How could this possibly happen to a well-educated, spiritual person?” Ross asked.

Gwen Florio

Here’s a young man whose accomplishments, at such an early age, make us feel both impressed and …exhausted!

Only 25, Josh Marceau is a University of Montana doctoral student whose photo already hangs on the wall of fame at the Native American Research Laboratory in UM. Marceau, who is Salish, got his bachelor’s degree at Penn Sate and then came home to Montana – after turning down prestigious graduate programs.

“Turning down Dartmouth and Washington was hard, but it was the right choice,” Marceau tells the Missoulian’s Betsy Cohen. “I want to end up back here, I want to teach at the tribal college.”

Oh, and did we mention his jewelry business? Check it out here, on etsy.com. And read Cohen’s entire story here, or below:

With steady practiced hands, Josh Marceau waves a blowtorch under a small crucible filled with silver and waits for the bright metal to become liquid.

The flame burns hot, and within a few moments, the magical transformation takes place.

“I think it’s my favorite part about jewelry making,” said Marceau, grinning. “I never get tired of watching the melting part.”

This alchemy takes place most evenings in a basement apartment where Marceau lives with his wife, Ellen. Here, the 25-year-old artist creates pendants, earrings, rings and other lovely items which he sells on the artisan Web site, www.etsy.com.

By night, he draws inspiration from heartfelt sources: his love for Montana’s natural beauty, Ellen’s love of Celtic designs, his life experiences growing up in Ronan, his Salish heritage.

By day, Marceau is a University of Montana doctoral student who spends most of his time in a chemistry lab, pursuing his degree in biomedical science, and helping to understand and cure human diseases.

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Marie Cowen, of the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana, has seen more than her share of sorrow – starting with her removal from the reservation at the age of 9, when she was sent to boarding school in South Dakota.

Vince Devlin of the Missoulian follows the twists and turns of her story far better than we could do. Read it here. It’s a great kickoff to Thanksgiving week:

RONAN – This started out as a feature story about the Ronan Community Thanksgiving Day Dinner and the 82-year-old woman, Marie Cowen, who started it a dozen years ago.

When you walk through the door of Cowen’s home, however, it’s hard to see the turkeys for the bears.

Cowen, it turns out, has been collecting teddy bears for 15 years, buying most of them at garage sales, and to say she’s taken her hobby seriously doesn’t begin to cover it.

The bears are everywhere in Cowen’s little home off Terrace Lake Road east of town, every shape, size and color you can imagine, on virtually every shelf, table and wall in the place – somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 of them, she estimates.

“If you want to count them, go ahead,” she says.

She and a granddaughter once tried, beginning with the teddy bears in Cowen’s bedroom.

“When we got to 2,100, I said, ‘Enough,’ ” Cowen says.

They weren’t even done with the first room.

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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