It’s a niche market created by the last segment of Montana’s Clean Indoor Air Act originally put in place four years ago. Across the state smoking is now prohibited in all indoor public places, including bars and casinos that had, up until Oct. 1, an exemption if they did not allow anyone younger than 18 to enter their establishments. 

 So it’s not surprising that some businesses on the state’s Indian Reservations, which are not subject to the Montana Clean Indoor Air Act, are now marketing to people who like to have a cigarette with their cup of coffee, meal or adult beverage or while gambling ‚Äî indoors. 

That’s how the free market works. Entre- preneurs fill unmet demands. Reservation-based businesses are capitalizing on their advantage ‚Äî customers can smoke inside at their places, while everywhere else in the state those customers have to step outside.

But unlike other advantages reservation-based casinos have capitalized on ‚Äî namely technology boosted bingo games that offer slot-machine like experiences with possible payouts far in excess of Montana’s $800 limit on video gaming machines ‚Äî allowing patrons to continue to smoke inside stinks.

There’s no denying that many hope the Montana Clean Indoor Act will prompt some to kick the tobacco habit. But the real force behind the measure is to give employees everywhere a healthier work environment. Secondhand smoke is a health hazard. Science has proven it.

So while nonsmoking patrons can choose to spend their dollars in smoke-free establishments, employees who work somewhere that allows smoking don’t have the same choice.

Unemployment on the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation is about 50 percent. Do employees of casinos that allow smoking really have the option of looking for another job that does not expose them to secondhand smoke without facing significant obstacles, such as a longer commute?

Tribes are waging a battle on commercial tobacco use, cigarettes and spit tobacco, for a good reason. According to the Montana Department of Public Health and Hu-man Services, the prevalence of smoking among Native American adults was 55 percent in 2008, compared with 14 percent of white adults. Native Americans are dying from heart disease because of higher rates of tobacco use, among other factors, according to the health department.

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009910200304

A small Manitoba First Nations community that lost two children to separate house fires this year is celebrating the construction of a fireproof home for a family still gripped by grief.

Construction continued Monday on the Sandy Bay reserve on a house wrapped in galvanized steel with large, easy-to-escape windows and floors coated with fire-retardant material.

The home is being donated by an aboriginal housing business working with First Nation leaders across Canada to put more fireproof houses on reserves.

Dick Morrison, CEO of RJ Ecosafe Homes, said the company’s owner, Ross Johnson, hoped the donation would bring some comfort to Michael Dumas and his family.

‘Every First Nations house should be built like this.’‚Äî Chief Russell Beaulieu, Sandy Bay Ojibway First Nation

Dumas’s youngest daughter, Hope Richard, 9, died in a fire at Dumas’s home in Sandy Bay in February. She was trapped in a bedroom and couldn’t be rescued in time.

Fifteen people lived in the older wood-frame house on the reserve, about 50 kilometres north of Portage la Prairie, Man.

Tragedy struck again in Sandy Bay under similar circumstances in May.

Five-year-old Tristan Mousseau died in an early morning fire in a small three-bedroom house, where 11 people slept.

Morrison said that when Johnson heard what happened, he wanted to help.

“[He‚Äôs] a Christian man, a God-fearing man,” Morrison said. “His hope is that this is Hope calling out from the grave that things need to change, and things can change.”

Construction continues on a fireproof house on Manitoba’s Sandy Bay Ojibway First Nation, where Hope Richard, 9, died in a fire in February. (CBC)Morrison believes the homes the company builds can save lives.

“Hope was trapped in a bedroom and she couldn‚Äôt get out,” he said. “There was no window. We can‚Äôt replace Hope. We can replace the home and we don‚Äôt want [Dumas] to ever think about that again.”

The children’s deaths renewed calls from Chief Russell Beaulieu of the Sandy Bay Ojibway First Nation for the federal government to step up efforts to deal with overcrowding and poor housing on reserves.

According to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., the rate of house fires on reserves is two and a half times greater than for the rest of Canada. The death rate from fires is more than 10 times higher.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2009/10/19/191009-housing-sandy-bay.html?ref=rss

This summer, the nonprofit Southern California Indian Center and its multimedia training and production initiative, InterTribal Entertainment, collaborated with the professional Acting Company Native Voices at the Autry to sponsor summer workshops for Native American youth in the Los Angeles area. The program was called “Sharing Our Stories: Young Native Voices Acting/Writing Workshops.”

The workshops were designed to give Native youth the opportunity to pursue acting and/or playwrighting in a supportive and professional environment. Students could take part in one or both tracks, depending on interests and availability. The month-long acting track took place in June, classes were held at SCIC’s downtown Los Angeles location.

‚ÄúWe saw a need to develop and to increase the pool of Native American acting talent as well as the need to provide summer programming for kids here in L.A.,‚Äù said James Lujan (Taos Pueblo) SCIC planner and ITEdirector. ‚ÄúThis summer, ITE partnered with Native Voices at the Autry to join forces to serve the community.‚Äù

Located near Hollywood, ITE’s primary goals are “to provide training and employment opportunities for Native Americans in the entertainment industry and to develop, produce and market film, television and multimedia projects which contribute to a greater understanding of the American Indian experience.”

Students in the acting track had workshops in a variety of situations including: Theater Training, Commercial Acting, Auditioning, Acting for TV Sitcoms and Acting for Film. Each student who completed the program received a professional headshot and acting resume. The Summer Acting Workshop was facilitated by professional actors including Elena Finney (Mescalero Apache, Tarascan) and Andrew Roa (Shasta, Aztec).

“Participating in the program as a teaching artist was an amazing experience. I get just as much out of it as the kids do,” Finney said. “It is so important that these young artists are nurtured and have a strong Native identity in their work. All the teaching artists wanted to be involved, not only to offer writing and performing opportunities but to be positive role models for the youth.”

Other guest artists included professional actors Shishonia Franchesca (Navajo), Happy Frejo (Seminole, Pawnee) and Jason Grasl (Blackfeet), who all served as guest speakers.

Also located in Los Angeles, Native Voices at the Autry is devoted to developing and producing new works for the stage by Native American playwrights. Established in 1999, Native Voices at the Autry was created to provide a supportive and collaborative setting for Native American playwrights and actors from across the U.S. and Canada to develop and produce their work. For several years, Native Voices at the Autry has sponsored the ‚ÄúYoung Native Voices: Theater Education Project‚Äù which has provided workshops for Native American youth.

“Native Voices at the Autry believes in the spirit of collaboration, we wanted to partner with ITE this summer to maximize our programming efforts for youth,” said Rich Deely, interim senior manager for Native Voices at the Autry. “In addition, part of Native Voice’s commitment is to foster young Native voices and instill in the youth a sense of possibility. The workshops allow the young people to build a performing or writing skill set and expose them to professionals in the field.”

This summer’s playwrighting track sessions occurred in July, with classes held at the Autry National Center. Students worked side-by-side with professional Native writers to build original storylines, learn professional formatting, develop dialogue and create a short one-act play. Professional writers Princess Lucaj (Gwich’in Athabascan) and Larissa FastHorse (Lakota-Sicangu Nation) served as principal teaching artists for the workshop.

http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/living/64490392.html

Growing up on the Fort Belknap Reservation, Tuffy Helgeson played basketball and hopscotch and jumped rope, but never learned any of the traditional Native American games integral to his heritage.

ERIK PETERSEN/CHRONICLE Douglas Red Eagle, 12, a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota Sioux from Helena, attempts to throw an arrow through a moving hoop Thursday at Chief Joseph Middle School during traditional games clinic.People just didn’t know them anymore.

That changed five years ago when a “blanket ceremony” came to Fort Belknap. Blanket ceremonies involve the arrival of a blanket containing equipment and instructions for traditional Plains Indians games. Everyone is welcome to play and each reservation contributes its own game to the bunch before the blanket is sent along.

“It was kind of an awakening,” Helgeson said. “We had never heard of them before, and then everyone started playing them.”

Since then, Helgeson has teamed up with the International Traditional Games Society to reintroduce Native American games that were largely lost due to forced government assimilation programs in the 19th century. Helgeson primarily works in Montana, but the group, founded in 1997, travels around the country and Canada,

“It gives non-native and native students alike the chance to learn about each other,” he said.

On Thursday, Helgeson was part of a traditional games workshop for educators at Chief Joseph Middle School in Bozeman. The games are used as a teaching tool under the state’s Indian Education for All.

Knowledge of these games is critical to understanding the culture and heritage of the state’s Indian tribes, said DeeAnna Brady-Leader, former educator and executive director of the East-Glacier based International Traditional Games Society. Since the group was founded, more than 60 North American tribal games have been recovered.

Besides providing entertainment and physical fitness, playing games taught important social and survival skills to native youth, benefits that modern activities don’t provide, she said.

“In modern times, children of all cultures have been removed from nature, they have very little multigenerational interaction and very little physical interaction in their daily lives,” Brady-Leader said. “Today we have knowledge gained through technology, but it cannot stand alone.”

Tribal agencies are starting to use the games to engage youth in programs addressing issues like diabetes and drug and alcohol abuse, she said.

“Once they receive the knowledge, they are able to utilize it in a way that is unique to their culture and their time,” she said.

On Thursday, Brady-Leader and Richard Horn, an artist and cultural expert of the Blackfeet tribe, led 16 participants through several games, including “sticks in fist,” an intuitive challenge that involves one person holding a fistful of seemingly similar sticks and another player trying to eliminate them one by one until only a pre-marked stick is left.

http://bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2009/10/16/news/400games.txt

SEATTLE — Bagging his first deer was a rite of passage for 13-year-old Josh Hamilton. After bringing home the three-point buck, Josh had another tradition to honor.

On Tuesday morning, the young Tulalip tribal member climbed warily out of his grandfather’s truck in the middle of Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood.

A shy Totem Middle School eighth-grader, Josh was greeted on the sidewalk by staff and clients of the Chief Seattle Club, a nonprofit organization that provides support to about 200 low-income and homeless urban American Indians and Alaska Natives. 

Josh was there to give away his butchered deer to help feed the people who frequent the club’s day shelter. He helped unload coolers of venison from the truck and carried the meat to the club’s kitchen. 

‚ÄúOur tradition is that when a boy gets his first deer, he must give it away to those who would appreciate the help,‚Äù Josh’s mother Andrea Hamilton said as she watched her son. ‚ÄúJosh knows his grandpa brings fish to the Chief Seattle Club, so he wanted to give his deer to our people here on the streets.‚Äù

Tall for his age, Josh accepted hugs, handshakes and high-fives from men who called him “brother.”

The Rev. Patrick Twohy, a Catholic priest who ministered for many years on the Tulalip and Swinomish reservations, asked the people gathered to accept Josh’s gift to form a circle in the lobby of the club.

Josh, who lives with his family in Tulalip, has known ‚ÄúFather Pat‚Äù since he was a little boy and was happy to see the priest, who now splits his time between Chief Seattle Club and Tacoma’s Mount Tahoma Indian Center.

Following another tradition, Chief Seattle’s executive director Jenine Grey, a young Tlingit woman, pinned a blanket around Josh as one of the elderly men in the circle sang and kept a beat on his deer-skin drum.

‚ÄúWe are humbled and honored by your gift,‚Äù Grey said. ‚ÄúIt will nourish the bodies and spirits of people who don’t often have the chance to eat traditional foods. In this urban world where we live, a gift like this will bring tears to their eyes.‚Äù

Josh’s grandfather, longtime Marysville School Board director Don Hatch, said he hoped the deer meat and the fresh fish and smoked salmon he brought along would be received as medicine by people at the club. He also praised the Tulalip Tribes and his friends and relatives who helped prepare the food for delivery to Chief Seattle Club.

‚ÄúAnd thank you for taking our gift,‚Äù Hatch told the group. ‚ÄúI hope this is a day Josh will remember forever.‚Äù 

The brief ceremony concluded with prayer and a round of thank-yous in several native languages.

Josh raised his hands in thanks and smiled.

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20091016/NEWS01/710169849&news01ad=1

Members of the Independent Traditional Seminole Nation of Florida call Bobby C. Billie their spiritual leader and medicine man.

To Holly Baker, a Central Florida mother of two of Billie’s children, he’s a deadbeat dad who has failed to provide years worth of child support. She’s suing to get that financial support.

But what makes an otherwise-ordinary child-support case in Orange Circuit Court so compelling is Billie’s legal argument: As the spiritual leader of an independent Native American community, Billie says he is exempt from U.S. and Florida laws.

Testifying on Thursday, Billie said he was neither a foreigner nor U.S. citizen, but an indigenous person living with others on their land.

“We don’t recognize the United States,” Billie said in court while holding an eagle’s feather that he called a symbol of natural law and the ability to hunt, kill and continue feeding one’s family.

That view isn’t news to Baker, who is fighting for funds for 11-year-old son Nicholas and 9-year-old daughter Eve

Baker and her attorney, Gary Israel, maintain that Billie, 64, is using his position within his small indigenous culture to shirk his responsibilities as a parent.

“He’s basically abandoned his own children,” Baker said earlier this week. “This is really a spiritual leader who has no honor.”

Billie testified Thursday that despite his high standing within his community, he has no regular source of income, no job, a bad back and no real way of paying child support.

Billie explained that he doesn’t really have a job, but as a leader and an elder he has responsibilities overseeing ceremonies in his community, handling matters when members die and naming babies. He also has identified desecrated Native American burial grounds around the state and fought, as he said, “to bring our ancestors back into the ground.”

He made a sharp distinction between his sect and the better known Seminole Tribe of Florida, a political group recognized by the government.

“We don’t have money. We don’t have houses, all those things they have,” Billie said when questioned by Israel. “We choose not to live that way. That’s the difference.”

Over the years, Billie has made news speaking out against proposed developments being built on land believed to be burial grounds. At one point Thursday, when Billie was asked what he considered to be the land of his people, he quietly said, “Most of the United States.”

Yet Israel argued in court that despite his strict adherence to tradition, Billie has yielded to the conveniences of modern life when they’ve suited his needs. He has a driver’s license. He has visited a doctor for back problems. He has been paid in the past for services, such as building chickee huts. He took his children on a shopping spree for toys.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/orl-seminole-nation-child-support-101509,0,6196117.story

Today Congress passed an Energy and Water Appropriations bill that slashes funding for a proposed national nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Big deal, right? Well the move doesn’t sit too well with the Prairie Island Indian Community whose reservation near Red Wing resides a mere 600 yards from a nuclear storage site– a repository that would presumably be phased out after the establishment of a national site at Yucca Mountain.

The 40-year-old site is operated by Xcel Energy, which will maintain storage licensing rights to the site through 2014. Today the Prairie Island community put out a press release lambasting President Obama for scrapping the Yucca plan.

The very people tapped to provide entertainment during Cowichan’s Olympic torch run said they would like to lead a protest instead.

Dianne Hinkley said Cowichan’s Spirit Drummers plan to show their displeasure about the decision to fit Canadian Winter Games athletes with a “Cowichan sweater knock-off” when the torch passes through Duncan Oct. 31.

“Everyone will wear a Cowichan sweater or vest as a silent protest,” said drummer Hinkley, who said she estimates 150 drummers could attend the event.

Cowichan knitters will also be taking sweater orders and a list of spare sweaters to loan out for Oct. 31 is being compiled, she said.

“I hope this is the Cowichan Valley’s way of thumbing our noses back at them,” said Hinkley.

“The whole idea of having a Cowichan sweater as part of our official Olympic apparel was brought out about two years ago,” she said of the News Leader Pictorial drive. “It was a great idea and many people thought so.”

So, apparently, did the Hudson Bay Co. at one time.

Tribes’ general manager Ernie Elliott said the Bay approached the Tribes late in 2008 to see if knitters would be willing and able to produce up to 750 genuine Cowichan sweaters for the Olympic team.

A proposal was developed and traditional knitters of Cowichan descent living outside the community were enlisted to help with the large order.

The proposal was sent to the Bay, but nothing more was heard, Elliott said.

In a statement released Thursday, the Bay acknowledges it approached Tribes, but said it believed the local knitters would be unable to fill the order.

Issues of concern of aboriginal women were a key item for Lila Duffy when she addressed the annual general assembly of the Newfoundland Aboriginal Women’s Network on Saturday.

The director of women’s issues and gender equality for Indian and Northern Affairs Canada provided some statistics from the 2006 census, which compare the situation of aboriginal women in relation to aboriginal men and other Canadians.

Duffy spoke specifically about the leadership of aboriginal women and their role in gaining economic security and prosperity, and justice and violence. Close to 50 aboriginal women attended the weekend event.

Sheila Robinson, president of the Newfoundland Aboriginal Women’s Network, said it looks now like the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation Band is going to be formed and a significant amount of women who are members of the network will be member in that band.

“These members were really interested in hearing from Indian and Northern Affairs Canada and how they will fit in as women.” Robinson said during an interview following Duffy’s presentation. They wanted to hear what issues are there and what programs are available. This is the first time we’ve made a connection with Indian and Northern Affairs Canada as a women’s group.”

Robinson said there were a number of concerns expressed because the women are wondering exactly how programs will work for them as status Indians, but part of a landless band when a lot of the programs are designed for on-reserve or urban aboriginals.

“We don’t have a reserve, so exactly what does that mean for us?” was one of the questions Robinson posed on behalf of her members.