Really excellent, thoroughly reported article. I learned a lot. Maybe I’m just a city boy, but the attorney’s assertion that ranchers kill eagles because the birds are after their livestock struck me as odd. What are they? Field mouse ranchers?

I see both sides here: on one, it is disconcerting that our native people have started the process of commercializing something that is very sacred to most of our native american people, eagle and hawk feathers; on the other, at some level, i feel strongly that this is still an affront on our sovereign rights. Barter and trade is a necessary and essential part to our ceremonial life that goes back into precoombian times, when there were vast trade networks spanning across the whole continent. what we need in one part of the country is what others have, and the same: what they need is what we got. it is only right for us to trade with one another. this is against the law according to the lacey act. but when greed gets involved, and these are done for profit, that is when it is not good. however, then again, traditionally, at least for us plains tribes, there are people that traditionally went out and got these birds for our people. out of generosity, we would give them horses, tipi skins, or whatever we could for what they gave us. this is just extended to modern day times with money.
All in all, i thinnk that nowadaays, it is a sad fact that the federal government is granting us access to certain leagl protections, but, because of these “rights”, we have to walk very narrowly according to what they deem is appropriate for our religions and ceremonies. Furthermore, i think that they are unnecessarily targeting our people when the usfw should police the greater country. i do not ever hear of them going after the big game trophy hunters that are going overseas and slaughtering endangered species. these laws that they follow go back to when unecessarily, the greater european society had the wholesale slaughter of many types of birds for use in women’s hats in european society. this craze led to many birds becoming extinct. also the eagle almost went extinct due to the combined effects of ddt, and earlier, the effects of farmers unecessarilyy killing eagles for taking their livestock, so, they would shoot them all. we as indian poeple have caretaken this land for millenia, now, we have to pay for the rules created because of the conflict generated amongst the greater euro-society, because of their past abuses on this continent?