BOSTON ‚Äì An anthropology professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston is inviting Native American veterans to participate in an anonymous online survey to track the relationships between Native American history, colonial wars, and U.S. military language in conflicts of the last 50 years.

Professor Steve Silliman of the university’s Department of Anthropology, said the project, called “Terms of Engagement: Understanding the Words of War,” is designed to study how military personnel use figures of speech to explain, describe, or get through times of conflict.

“We are interested in knowing how often certain phrases – such as those that refer to “the Wild West,” “Indian country,” or “cowboys and Indians” – were used in particular wars, who used them, and when. Many have studied the larger contexts of war or have made assumptions about those who fight in them, but few have studied directly the experiences and words of those who participate in the military and how these relate to Native American history and culture today. We want to hear directly from the soldiers and officers themselves about their experiences,” Silliman said.

Native American veterans or active personnel who have served in the U.S. Armed Forces from the 1960s onward can access and complete the survey online.

The survey should take between 10 and 15 minutes to complete, depending on the level of detail the participant wishes to provide.

Participation in the survey is completely voluntary and anonymous. Silliman is encouraging participants to complete the survey online since it will be faster and will save paper and postage costs, but participants may request paper versions by sending an e-mail to thewordsofwar@gmail.com.

Participants may choose at the end of the survey to be contacted for a follow-up interview, but this step is completely optional and entirely confidential.

http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/national/northeast/69378442.html

Photo by J. Miles Cary

National Forest Service archaeologist Quentin Bass on Wednesday discusses the Unicoi Turnpike, which led to Fort Armistead, where thousands of Cherokee Indians were temporarily housed during their forced removal from their lands.

COKER CREEK, Tenn. – It has been more than 170 years since the dark days of the Cherokees’ forced removal from their lands in Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolinas.

Twenty-nine forts were used by the U.S. government to gather and temporarily house the migrating Cherokee, along with their families and slaves.

Cities with names like Hayesville and Murphy in North Carolina, Calhoun in Georgia, Charleston in Tennessee, and Fort Payne in Alabama have been built over most of these sites, so most of the physical fortifications have disappeared.

But remnants of one fort have been discovered in East Tennessee.

Because the Monroe County family that owned the property never plowed the land or used it for development, Cherokee National Forest archeologists are finding a treasure trove of historic relics from the former location of Fort Armistead.

The U.S. Forest Service purchased the 26-acre site in 2005 from Kenneth and Kathleen Dalton, and archeologists and volunteers began using metal detectors and controlled excavations to search in a grid pattern for artifacts.

Forest Service archeologist Quentin Bass said that work has revealed locations of block houses, a parade ground, a powder magazine, barracks and storage pits, along with many articles discarded by soldiers and Cherokee housed at the site.

“No one outside of this area knew about the location, but it was carried down through oral tradition and by the Dalton family, who owned the land,” Bass said.

Kathleen Dalton said they purchased the property as an investment and heard about rumors of the fort. But after finding artifacts at the site, they knew it should belong to the public trust; a grant through the Forest Service allowed the land to be purchased.

At the site is a portion of the original Trail of Tears, the removal path that 3,000 Cherokees from the mountains of Georgia, North Carolina and East Tennessee used to travel to the fort.

Part of the original Unicoi Turnpike, this section of the Trail of Tears – now a National Historic Trail – remains as it was more than 200 years ago, untouched by human development, said Tennessee Overhill Association Director Linda Caldwell.

Photo by J. Miles Cary

A section of the Unicoi Turnpike in Coker Creek, Tenn., near the site of Fort Armistead in the Cherokee National Forest, remains untouched by development. The turnpike, which was commissioned for commercial use in 1814, became part of the Trail of Tears.

“Fort Armistead is tied directly to the history of our state and nation,” she said, adding that its location on the Unicoi Turnpike Trail and purchase by the Forest Service has presented an opportunity to research and interpret the site as part of the overall trail project from North Carolina to the end of the turnpike at Fort Loudoun, Tenn.

Bass said representatives of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes – the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians from North Carolina, the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band of Oklahoma – met at the fort’s location about a year ago, and all were amazed at the beauty of the site that once was a tragic location.

A trail through time

The trail leading through Fort Armistead was used by American Indians for centuries and possibly by the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in 1540. It was the lowest gap through the Appalachians. Later, in the early 19th century, the trail was used to drive herds of cattle, swine and turkeys over the mountains to feed the eastern populations in South Carolina.

Commissioned as a commercial turnpike in 1816, stock stands were built every eight miles so livestock and drivers could rest overnight.

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/nov/03/remnants-fort-trail-tears-yield-relics/

At one point in his life, John Herrington admits, he was an underachiever.

His grade point average was 1.72, and his only passion in life was rock climbing near his Colorado home.

“I didn’t study,” he said. “If you don’t study you don’t pass your classes. I got kicked out of school (University of Colorado at Colorado Springs) for low grades. I had a 1.72 GPA. How do you go from having low grades to being an astronaut? That’s the challenge.”

Herrington, who had dreamed of being an astronaut as a child and took his first flying lesson in the 10th grade, met that challenge. The Wetumka native and member of the Chickasaw Tribe, eventually be-came the first American Indian to fly in space.

Herrington spoke Friday at Vance Air Force Base’s National American Indian Heritage Luncheon.

His topic was “Living Your Dreams,” and he took the first step toward living his own dream when he was using his rock climbing skills as a highway surveyor in a Colorado canyon after being booted from college. The job offered him his first exposure to the practical use of mathematics. His supervisor urged him to return to school and pursue an engineering degree. He did, and this time he succeeded.

A few years later, when Herrington was a senior, he tutored a retired Navy captain in calculus. The former aviator convinced him to become a Navy pilot in part by urging him to go see the movie “An Officer and a Gentleman,” in which Richard Gere portrayed a Navy student pilot.

Herrington went on to become distinguished graduate of Naval Aviation Officer Candidate School and to log more than 3,800 hours in more than 30 types of aircraft, including a stint as a test pilot.

In 1996 Herrington was tapped by NASA to join the astronaut corps. It would be six years before he would fly in space, but Nov. 23, 2002, he lifted off on space shuttle Endeavour for a 14-day mission to the International Space Station.

“Human spaceflight is an incredibly emotional experience,” Herrington said.

He commemorated his Chickasaw heritage by taking an eagle feather and flute with him into orbit.

Herrington made three space walks totaling 19 hours and 55 minutes during his mission. He said he was too busy to even have time to look out the space shuttle’s windows during the mission, until the shuttle’s landing was delayed for three days by bad weather.

‚ÄúHad we not been delayed for three days, I wouldn‚Äôt have had time to take a single picture for pleasure out the window of the shuttle, that‚Äôs how busy I was,‚Äù he said. ‚ÄúBut I was lucky. I got a three-day vacation on the shuttle and I was able to stick my nose against the window for three days and look at just remarkable sights.‚Äù 

Herrington never returned to space. After his shuttle flight he was ticketed to be commander of a crew on the International Space Station. But he was diagnosed with osteoporosis in his lower back, which precluded him from flying to the ISS on a Russian Soyuz capsule, because it lands not in water, but on land, when returning to earth. He could still fly on the shuttle, however.

http://www.enidnews.com/localnews/local_story_311002827.html

Lawrence film director Kevin Willmott spent the week in

Alaska, where his latest work, “The Only Good Indian,” opened at theaters as part of Native American Heritage Month.

Despite the subject matter of the feature being firmly rooted in Kansas history, the project resonated with the Anchorage community.

“There will be people after screenings who come up to you, and they’ll give you what I now call ‘the look,’” Willmott says.

“There will be tears in their eyes — a lady in Alaska just ran up and hugged me. It’s because they went to boarding school or their mother went to a boarding school. And this is a piece of history that no one has acknowledged before.”

That forgotten history serves as the crux of “The Only Good Indian,” which was shot in Kansas during the summer of 2007. In the film, newcomer Winter Fox Frank plays a teenager taken from his family during the early 1900s and forcibly sent to Haskell under government orders to integrate into white society. He escapes with the intention of returning to his tribe on the Kickapoo of Kansas reservation. Wes Studi portrays a Cherokee bounty hunter hired to recapture the student, and J. Kenneth Campbell plays a legendary “Indian fighter”-turned-sheriff who ultimately pursues them both.

The independent movie makes its Lawrence premiere tonight at Liberty Hall, 644 Mass.

Willmott considers the project a “revisionist western.”

“It’s revisionist in that it’s told from the point of view of Native Americans,” says Willmott, an associate professor of theater and film at Kansas University. “There’s not a white surrogate in the film to make the story ‘OK.’ I want people to experience the story from the point of view of the people it’s about. That still is a huge challenge in America.”

The film has done well recently in competitions at the Newport Beach International Film Festival, Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival and the Tallgrass Film Festival in Wichita, where it set attendance records. While the festival circuit has embraced the project, Willmott really considers Native Americans as his primary target audience.

“You have to narrow it down to a group of folks you can depend on,” he says. “We know we have a film everybody will like — ‘everybody’ means anybody who has a brain. But the challenge of self-distribution is you’ve got to get it to them. So you got to start with the people you can count on and go from there.”

Community outreach

When writer-producer Tom Carmody first came up with the story in 2005, he turned to the Native American community for help with ensuring the tale was culturally and historically truthful.

“Dan Wildcat and Hanay Geiogamah, who are co-executive producers on the film, really looked at it from a Native American perspective — since I’m not Native American — and they were saying, ‘No, that wouldn’t have happened. You might consider this.’ That made a huge difference for us,” Carmody recalls.

Carmody points to certain changes that were introduced, such as a scene that originally depicted Haskell students as being brought there in chains. Wildcat corrected that as being historically inaccurate, and switched the detail to only those who had attempted escape being tied with ropes.

Another scene initially had the school characters visiting a neighboring graveyard at night in honor of the fellow students who had died there.

http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2009/nov/06/western-union-only-good-indian-explores-cultural-h/

A Central Plains aboriginal youth will be running with the torch bearers as part of a relay for a leg of the tour in the Portage la Prairie area for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics.

Jamie Mousseau, 25, who currently lives in Portage and originates from Long Plain First Nation and Sandy Bay First Nation, is excited to be chosen to participate as the Aboriginal Youth Flame Attendant in the relay.

“It feels amazing,” he said on Oct. 31. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance opportunity.”

There were only 11 youth chosen to participate as youth flame attendants from across Canada.

An attendant provides support to the torch carrier in the relay and protects the flame during the run.

“This is the first time they had it, so it is really special,” Mousseau said. “It’s more for support. If someone can’t really carry the torch and is having a rough time, we can help them out, in any which way we need to.”

He said there may also be some individuals carrying the torches who require wheelchairs, are visually impaired, or have other disabilities and the youth would be able to assist them.

He will participate on Jan. 6 and 7 in the Portage area.

Mousseau noted he was chosen for the role due to his commitment to helping other youth achieve their goals and his work as a youth role model.

At Long Plain, Mousseau works as an educational assistant at Long Plain School. He also participates in volunteer activities in the community, such as supervising gym nights at Long Plain School for youth during the week. He is hoping to later become a recreation director.

He says it is important for kids to stay active and keep a positive attitude about the future.

http://www.cpheraldleader.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2163210

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration intends to seek resolution to a lawsuit filed by American Indian farmers who alleged discrimination in the granting of federal agricultural loans over three decades.

The lawsuit, filed in 1999, contends Indian farmers and ranchers lost about $500 million during the past three decades because of discrimination in lending from the Agriculture Department’s Farm Service Agency. The agency issues loans to farmers and ranchers who cannot get credit from commercial lenders.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told Indian farmers and ranchers during a meeting Thursday that the department was “committed to resolving” litigation involving them.

On Friday, Justice Department spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz said the case is expected to be considered again by the court early next year. While it “would be premature to discuss settlement” at this time, she said the Agriculture and Justice departments “will give fair consideration to settling claims based on the facts and circumstances of each case.”

The lawsuit, named after George Keepseagle, a Fort Yates, N.D., rancher, claimed the Agriculture Department denied or delayed loans or failed to approve enough money for tribal farmers and ranchers.

Indian farmers and ranchers have said local USDA officials tried to squeeze them out of business by denying them loans that instead went to their white neighbors and by refusing to restructure loans in bad years as was done for whites.

“It’s a detriment to us to have to be put in a position where, truly, the non-Indian farmers and ranchers are getting all the help and we’re not,” said Cedric Black Eagle, chairman of the Crow Tribe in southeastern Montana.

The plaintiffs estimate that Indian farmers lost out on more than $14 billion in loans from 1981 to 2006. The loans would have generated $462 million to $491 million in income, according to the estimate.

The case was granted class-action status in 2001 and the plaintiffs have said they are ready to go to trial. But they have expressed hope the Obama administration would consider a settlement, pointing to a similar one that USDA reached with black farmers under President Bill Clinton in 1999. The government has paid damages of $980 million in that case even as it has fought the Indian lawsuit in court.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hysQpMEZlnYyfm95vYgSZ43q1FJQD9BQAGL00

AMHERST – Thousands of books from local library sales made their way across the country this week, headed for Navajo readers 2,300 miles away.

Reader to Reader, an Amherst organization that has collected and given away 2.5 million books in the past eight years, received a visit this week from Irving Nelson of the Navajo Nation Library in Window Rock, Ariz.

On Tuesday, he and an associate rented a 26-foot truck and loaded 10,000 books, along with 10 computers donated by Amherst College, into it.

On Friday, they were expected to arrive in Window Rock, which is on the New Mexico border. Nelson will catalog the books and make them available to 280,000 people who live in the 27,000-square-mile Navajo area.

“We are a book-rich community, and we have so many libraries,” said David Mazor, founder and executive director of Reader to Reader. “They have one central library with responsibility for a massive area. This is something that we have a surplus of that we can share with them.”

Reader to Reader acquired two-thirds of the books by screening 100,000 volumes left over from sales in Amherst, Northampton, Sunderland, Belchertown and Granby, Mazor said. The Mystery Writers of America donated 2,000 books, and the 7,000 people on the organization’s email list contributed most of the rest.

Amherst College employees have previously used the donated computers, and they have been refurbished and given new software, Mazor said. They will double the number of computers at the Navajo Nation Library.

“The books will get heavily used,” said Nelson. “They’ll go out across the entire Navajo Nation. People will come long distances for them. And we don’t have enough computers to meet the needs of our people.”

About half of the books are for children and young readers, the age range where the library gets the most use. Nelson provides books to 125 elementary schools in the Navajo area, some seven hours away from Window Rock, he said. In addition to the mysteries, there are about 80 art books and lots of cookbooks and volumes on Native Americans, Mazor said.

The library has 73,000 books, plus magazines, newspapers and a reference section that gets inquiries from all over the world, Nelson said. Mazor said he has set a goal of providing the library with 100,000 books and 100 computers over the next five years.

“This for us is just the start,” he said.

Reader to Reader is based at Amherst College’s Cadigan Center for Religious Life on Woodside Avenue. Last May, Mazor took a group of Amherst students to the Navajo area; he is planning another trip in March.

The Navajo Nation is paying the expenses of flying two people from Albuquerque to Bradley International Airport, and the $2,600 cost of renting the truck. Transporting the books this way is more cost-effective than shipping them, Mazor said.

“This is so gratifying,” Nelson said. “I’m not going to even see the impact on the kids, but I’ve seen photographs of them with the books. That makes it all worthwhile. In the long hours driving home, we’ll be imagining smiles like that all over the Navajo Nation.”

Mazor insists that all the used books he donates be in excellent condition, almost like new ones. Reader to Reader has supplied books to 400 schools and community libraries across the United States, and is about to launch its first overseas program in rural Costa Rica, he said. It donates more than 1,000 books a week to schools and libraries in Holyoke, Chicopee, Springfield and West Springfield, he said.

http://www.gazettenet.com/2009/11/07/reading-relay

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/06/MV7E1AE3I0.DTL#ixzz0WBoTWIQf

Torsten Kjellstrand/The OregonianMarcus Luke (right) married his college sweetheart, Rachel (left), but is encouraging their son, Aaron, to seek a Native American spouse when he grows up. Luke fears that continued assimilation will relegate Native American culture to history books. “We are not just like everybody else,” he says. “My blood comes from this land; my religion comes from this land.”
Aaron Luke is only 7, but his father, Marcus Luke, is already coaching him on whom to marry when he grows up: a Native American. 

It’s ironic advice from a man who married a white woman and still takes grief for it from relatives. But intermarriage has become so rampant, says Marcus Luke, that Natives are in danger of losing their culture. 

“It’s a touchy issue. It’s tough, really tough,” says Luke, 38, who lives near theUmatilla Indian Reservation just outside Pendleton with his wife, Rachel, and their son. “Too much assimilation is what it comes down to. My son is half Native American and half Caucasian. Which way does he go?” 

Marcus Luke is among Native Americans across the nation grappling with thorny issues of identity, culture and tribal resources as more among them marry outside tribe and race. 

For both individuals and tribes, questions surrounding intermarriage strike at the heart of what it means to be a Native American. Just how much “blood quantum” — a term U.S. officials coined in the 19th century — does it take to be considered a Native American? 

And where do tribes set the bar for enrollment? If they set it too high, they risk shutting out members and dwindling into oblivion; too low, and they spread resources too thin or render their identity meaningless. The proliferation of casinos has raised the financial stakes. 

Gary Garrison, a U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs spokesman in Washington, D.C., envisions a day within a century when “marrying out” leaves tribal members with little resemblance to their forebears and little reason to call themselves Natives. 

Brooklyn D. Baptiste, vice chairman of the tribal government at Idaho’s Nez Perce Reservation, agrees. 

“We do need to let the people know, ‘If you continue on this way, there will be a sunset to our tribe, maybe in 70 or 80 years,’” he says. “What is the point of fighting for all these treaty rights if there is nobody left to exercise them?” 

Estimates of intermarriage rates are imprecise. A 2000 book by Harvard professor Werner Sollors says more than half of married Native American adults in the U.S. in 1990 were married to a non-Native. The Encyclopedia of American History puts that number at about two-thirds in 2000. 

Garrison says it’s impossible to know. No one tracks it, and a study would be costly and difficult because some tribes “don’t want to be studied.” 

Paradoxically, intermarriage has played a role in increasing the Native population. The U.S. census counted just 240,000 American Indian, Eskimo and Aleut in 1900, down from estimates of as many as 12 million or more in North America before Europeans arrived. 

But last year, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated the American Indian and Alaska Native population at more than 3 million (nearly 5 million counting those who identify themselves as Natives of mixed race), with 54,000 in Oregon. Those numbers are expected to grow. 

Not everyone thinks intermarriage is a problem. Joseph Myers, executive director of the National Indian Justice Center in Santa Rosa, Calif., says Natives should focus on educating people about their heritage. 

“I don’t think we do each other any justice by getting stuck on this idea that you can save Indian culture and traditions by blood quantum,” says Myers, whose center provides legal education and training. 

The issue is playing out in varied and unexpected ways. At the Nez Perce Reservation, members must be one-quarter Nez Perce to qualify for tribal enrollment. That’s excluded about 200 young residents from the tribe’s enrollment of about 3,400. 

“They live the same lifestyle, in the same community, have the same needs, but without a tribal card,” Baptiste says. And without tribal hunting and fishing privileges, they can’t carry on a tradition of providing food for elderly grandparents, he says. 

Nationally, a trend is under way to boost membership by lowering blood-quantum requirements, says Garrison of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Oklahoma’s Cherokee Nation, for example, requires only that candidates prove descent from a Native American who lived there between 1896 and 1907, he says.  

The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation accepts anyone with an enrolled parent or grandparent and who can prove they have one-quarter Native blood from any federally recognized tribe. 

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/11/oregon_family_at_heart_of_stic.html