Archive for November 15th, 2009

15
Nov

Indian Country Sunday Brunch: Ira Hayes; Rosebud travel costs; Navajo finances; White buffalo; Young warrior book

   Posted by: admin    in Native music, Navajo, Pima, Rosebud Sioux, Salish Kootenai College, Senate Committee on Indian Affairs

Johnny Cash used Ira Hayes ballad to make anti-war, pro-Native point with Nixon
Here’s a bittersweet story about Johnny Cash’s visit to the White House to sing for President Richard Nixon. The president suggested some of his favorites like “Okie from Muskogee.” Cash responded instead with protest songs, among them “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” As the Salon story says, radio stations didn’t want to play the song about the Iwo Jima hero that highlighted the plight of Native Americans, but Cash counted it among his favorites. More to the point, it tells how that song came to be among Cash’s repertoire after a meeting with protest balladeer Peter LaFarge, son of Oliver LaFarge, whose tragic Navajo love story “Laughing Boy” won the Pulitzer Prize.

Former Rosebud Sioux official questions cost of D.C. trip
A former member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Council is questioning the travel expenses of 10 tribal members who flew to Washington, D.C., for last week’s White House Tribal Nations Conference. “It is kind of a shock to see that 10 of our elected officials traveled to Washington, D.C., when tribal paychecks were bouncing on the 30th of October, 2009,” Ron Valandra tells the Rapid City Journal here.

Navajo Times: Multimillion-dollar slush fund; possible AG probe
The Navajo Times continues its scrutiny of the tribe’s finances with this story by Marley Shebala reporting that more than $35 million went into the discretionary funds of the Navajo Nation Council, speaker’s office and president’s office from 2005 to 2009. And Jason Begay writes here that the attorney general has found enough information in the classified reports on President Joe Shirley Jr. to warrant hiring a special prosecutor to further investigate.

Senate committee to focus on gangs, drug smuggling in Indian Country
The Senate Indian Affairs Committee is holding an oversight hearing this week to focus on the problem of gangs and drug smuggling. Those issues are hitting some reservations hard as criminals realize that the tangle of legal jurisdiction on reservations, coupled with inadequate resources for law enforcement, can make it easier for them to operate there. The hearing will be webcast.

Pennsylvania sanctuary honors white buffalo
Seven Native American elders took part in a ceremony near Pittsburgh yesterday to thank owners of the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort for establishing a sanctuary for a rare white buffalo and a black buffalo born at a nearby zoo, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. The white buffalo, which was born Nov. 12, 2006, was given the Lenape name Kenahkihinen — translated in English as “watch over us.”

Young readers’ book tells story of abandoned Kootenai warrior and his survival
Salish Kootenai College in Montana has published a children’s book that tells the true story of a young Kootenai man, alone and without supplies or tools, abandoned in the middle of hostile enemy territory on the Great Plains during the 18th century, and how he turned to the land to survive. The story, written the seventh-grade level, was told by the late Kootenai elder Adeline Mathias and is illustrated by Kootenai artists Francis Auld and Debbie JosephThe Char-Koosta news tells how to order it, here.


Gwen Florio

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15
Nov

Compounding the Fort Hood tragedy: Critics of President Obama blast his attention to tribes that day

   Posted by: admin    in President Barack Obama


As if the horrific shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, weren’t bad enough, critics of President Barack Obama are seizing upon his remarks that day as he closed the long-scheduled White House Tribal Nations Conference.

The shootings occurred across the country from the conference, and in his closing remarks to tribal leaders, Obama paid tribute to a group that includes many veterans – including Crow historian, teacher and war chief Joe Medicine Crow, a recent recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom – and also to the victims of the still-unfolding tragedy.

“I plan to make some broader remarks about the challenges that lay ahead for Native Americans, as well as collaboration with our administration,” the president said that day, “but as some of you might have heard, there has been a tragic shooting at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas.” He went on to offer his prayers for the victims’ familes. (Read the full transcript here.)

But in those very words, as Indian Country Today’s Rob Capriccioso lays out in excellent detail here, lay the seeds of a manufactured controversy.

Some cable news commentators immediately pounced upon the president, saying he should have canceled the tribal nations summit and concentrated on the Fort Hood tragedy.

Fox News’ Glenn Beck twisted the entire scenario into an insinuation that the president supports reparations for Native Americans, a suggestion guaranteed to rile his conservative listeners. (See previous post here.)

Capriccioso reports that the backlash has stunned and angered many in Indian Country.

“The reaction of those commentators tells me that they just don’t get it,” Chris Stearns, a former senior official in the Clinton administration and current Seattle Human Rights commissioner, tells Capriccioso.

The Navajo Nation citizens adds that “the idea that the president should just drop American Indians from his agenda and close the door on us is the exact opposite of where he is coming from.”

As we’ve said before, it’s an insult to the Fort Hood victims and their loved ones, and to Native Americans as well, to politicize this tragedy in this particular way. We hope we don’t have to keep saying it.

Gwen Florio

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