January 26, 2010

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20101260301

• Blackfeet tribal members can help write their new constitution today in Browning.

A constitutional convention will be held today at Blackfeet Community College starting at 5 p.m. Participants will be broken into groups and will draft ideas on articles in the tribe’s new governing document.

A presentation of the ideas will be held later that night, and participants can refine them up until a deadline in February. The event is being put on by the Blackfeet Constitutional Reform Committee.

“The more people we can get to participate and feel ownership, the more success we will have,” said Lona Burns, committee spokeswoman.

The convention comes 19 months after Blackfeet voters overwhelmingly supported a referendum to overhaul the 75-year-old constitution. Voters hoped to add more checks and balances into the tribe’s charter.

The committee hopes the process will end in a secretarial election in which tribal members can adopt the new constitution in June.That also is when tribal elections are scheduled.A secretarial election is conducted by the federal Secretary of the Interior.

This process stalled last year because of a lack of community input and low turnout at reform meetings. The June 2008 referendum vote called for a secretarial election on the new constitution in June 2009, but the committee wasn’t ready.

The Blackfeet Tribal Business Council passed a resolution extending the deadline, allowing the committee to go back to work.

The project got new life with help from the Blackfoot Project, a group of Native American college students working to benefit the Blackfeet Nation. They led focus groups and have done survey work on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, along with analyzing what has and hasn’t worked in tribal constitutional reform.

Their research showed that the Blackfeet people wanted change, but they didn’t know how to get it. The Blackfeet currently have a centralized form of government, meaning the tribal council has full power to do what it wants, Burns said.

“The people definitely feel our current form of government doesn’t allow for fairness. They feel our justice system doesn’t work,” Burns said.

The committee has found that a separation of powers — or checks and balances — are needed for any tribe to be successful, Burns said. The federal government has three separate branches of government, but the committee wants to get input on how the Blackfeet want to incorporate their checks and balances.

Over the past few months, the committee has led educational symposiums on how the Blackfeet got their current constitution, which was adopted as a “boiler plate” charter during the Indian Reorganization Act in the 1930s.

There were attempts to change the Blackfeet constitution in the past, but sitting tribal councils shot them down under the threat of eroded power, Burns said.

People now want to be removed from the Indian Reorganization Act constitution and the restrictions it places on the tribe. They also want more recourse for fairness. If tribal members lose a tribal court appeal of a tribal council decision, they can only then appeal to that same tribal council.

“The people are more involved. They understand why it’s so important … they don’t want to sit back anymore,” Burns said.

Burns said Native American tribes across North America are pushing for new constitutions. The Crow Tribe previously has adopted a new charter, but the Fort Peck Tribes’ constitutional referendum attempt died last year.

After this convention, the committee will take these findings and go to the public for more outreach. The committee will fine-tune all of these findings and submit a new tribal constitution to the tribal council, which has to make a resolution calling for the secretarial election.

Past councils have refused to pass constitutional amendments on, but this sitting council has made a resolution to put the new charter up for vote in a secretarial election, regardless of the committee’s findings.

After the tribe passes a resolution, a secretarial election has to be held after a 90-day review process.

The historic nature of this project is understood by the committee, and those who are contributing to it.

“We’re hoping that 100 years from now, people are going to look back at what we did as positive and truly historic,” Burns said.

January 25, 2010  

http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=2483724

Rick MacWilliam/Canwest News Service The Hobbema home where 23-month-old Asia Saddleback was shot in the abdomen during a drive-by shooting in April 2008.

On the yellow and white houses along the highway connecting Hobbema to the Samson Indian Reserve, the menacing graffiti tags of the half-dozen gangs that once reigned unchallenged here have been replaced by vibrant coloured paintings of bison, wolves, teepees and bears. This is the neighbourhood where, in April 2008, a drive-by shooter fired a bullet through the home of Asia Saddleback’s grandfather, ripping into the 23-month-old girl’s abdomen. It was at the height of a gang war grown out of proportion to the place it erupted: By 2008, there were 13 gangs, with nearly 300 members, fighting for the scarce turf of just 12,000 living in and on reserves around Hobbema.

The shooting, which broadcast nationwide the scourge that had taken root here, was, locals say, an embarrassing but important breaking point. The community rallied, police refocused, the code of silence that left crimes unreported or unsolved was breached. Samson Chief Marvin Yellowbird imposed an evening curfew. He offered rewards for tips about a backlog of unsolved murders. He summoned bulldozers to level known crack houses. Families planted new gardens and painted murals around the outside of their homes, covering the gang signs.

“It used to be I didn’t want to say I was from Hobbema. I’d say I was from Ponoka, or Wetaskiwin,” says Roy Louis, a Samson elder who advises the RCMP on dealing with aboriginals, who make up the vast majority of people in the area. “Now I’m proud.”

Yesterday a Wetaskiwin judge heard arguments in the sentencing hearing of the man who critically wounded Asia Saddleback, leaving a bullet lodged between her liver and spine. Christopher Crane had pleaded guilty last year to a series of charges related to the shooting (another man, a youth at the time of the shooting, was given 12 months last year). Mr. Crane belonged to the Alberta Warriors; Saddleback family members allegedly belonged to their rivals, the Samson True Soldiers. At his hearing in Wetaskiwin, he said he began abusing drugs by age 11 and dropped out of school in Grade 7. At the time of the shooting he was an alcoholic 18-year-old with a drug habit and a sawed-off rifle.

There are other troubled, troubling young people like that here, even though the Samson First Nation is blessed with opportunity, in a sweet spot between what were, until recently, wildly booming cities – Red Deer an hour south, Edmonton an hour north – sitting along a corridor of energy resources.

The Samson band founded the Peace Hills Trust bank, which oversees more than half-a-billion dollars in assets. The band owns a shopping centre in Lake Louise. A $22-million education trust built from oil revenues has put 700 of its 7,000 members through college and university. The four Cree bands in the area – Samson (the largest), Ermineskin, Louis Bull and Montana – made so much from their joint stake in Imperial Oil’s rich Pigeon Lake oil field nearby that each member collects on his or her 18th birthday from a windfall trust fund. At one point, the cheques climbed well into the six figures; Mr. Crane told court yesterday he’d spent nearly half his $40,000 on marijuana and alcohol.

Perhaps it was the mix of young people – half Samson’s population is under 18 – with so much money that fuelled the drugs and, in turn, the violence, Mr. Louis wonders. For the big gang leaders “they were easy targets,” he supposes. Good people, he says, were “oblivious” as the criminal culture metastasized. The band administration was preoccupied, fighting a lawsuit against Ottawa. People ignored the signs: kids increasingly sporting colours and unusual amounts of cash. The gangs gradually grew. The year Asia Saddleback was shot, drive-bys had become a daily occurrence. Children no longer played outside, says Darcey Davidson, superintendent of the RCMP’s Battle River District Detachments. The seven homicides of 2008 put Hobbema’s murder rate nearly 30 times higher than Edmonton’s.

“We couldn’t put as much attention on gangs as we needed to. There’s no doubt about it,” Superintendent Davidson says. “Crime was substantial at that time. Members [of the RCMP] were busy enough doing that. While we tried to target gangs as much as we could, we had to look after these other matters.”

After the Saddleback shooting, that changed. The RCMP created a 15-member gang task force, suppressing the number of active gangs operating around Hobbema to seven. The local detachment worked to connect with the First Nations community, he says: officers join in the feasts and the wakes. He has implemented cultural training initiatives, and most members now manage a few Cree words – all to bridge a gap that he thinks kept wary citizens from helping Mounties and vice versa. But people in the community, he believes, have also taken responsibility on themselves for fixing the crime epidemic themselves. “They know it’s their problem, not just a problem for police.”

New ways to anonymously report drug dens are working, but a gun amnesty managed only to get a handful of firearms. Several past murders remain unsolved. “Calls for service”-reports from citizens called into police-about break and enters shot up from 195 in 2008 to 259 in 2009, but assaults stayed about the same, and weapons reports fell from 406 to 345, though that could mean either that the number of crimes is changing, or the number of people reporting it is. “If anybody lets down their guard, they’re only kidding themselves,” Superintendent Davidson says. And a block north of those brightly painted house murals, there remain entire cul-de-sacs of derelict homes, still wearing the graffiti threats from one gang against another, and inviting trouble, just down the road from the local high school.

Still, children play outside here now, sledding down heaps of ploughed neighbourhood snow. The murder rate has plummeted to one in 2009, although it was, as it happens, an allegedly gang-related shooting. There are still roughly 150 gangsters in and around Hobbema. The community has been tremendously courageous, says Michael Chettleburgh, author of Young Thugs: Inside the Dangerous World of Canadian Street Gangs, who has spent time in, and follows the progress of, Hobbema. But, he says, it hasn’t yet won.

“The psychology of the gang mentality, when things are running hot, when time and attention’s being paid on them, it’s not good for business. So it’s kind of like turning on the light and the cockroaches run into the dark,” he says. Gang members are lying low or have split town; they can resurface. “A lot of the fuelling factors for Hobbema’s woes are still there.” The place is better, far better, he says. It is not yet fixed.

Donations of bedding being accepted at Indigo Sun Tanning Spa in Chipley.

January 27th, 2010

http://www.fosterfollynews.com/news/2010Jan25BlanketsForIndians.php

January 23, 2010

The cone-shaped motel rooms along West Foothill Boulevard in San Bernardino are all but impossible to miss, with their 30-foot-tall frames standing as a reminder of a time when Route 66 was a popular cross-country roadway.

The Wigwam Motel was built in 1949, and was the last of seven that were built around the country.

The retro motel in San Bernardino features 19 of the teepees, which have wooden frames and are made of concrete and stucco.

  Motel rooms shaped like teepees are part of the retro kitsch of the Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino.

The motel was built by Frank Redford, an imaginative soul who was heavily influenced and inspired by Native American culture, according to the Wigwam Web site.

Redford initially built a teepee-shaped building near Horse Cave, Ky., in 1934 to showcase his collection of Native American relics. Later, he added teepee-shaped cabins where visitors could stay overnight.

He later had wigwams constructed near the outskirts of Cave City, Ky., not far from Mammoth Cave National Park. By the early 1950s, seven wigwam villages had been built in the Southern and Southwestern U.S.

Only three of the seven motels remain: the San Bernardino location, one in Holbrook, Ariz., and the Cave City location.

Although the motels are definitely retro in style, some efforts have been made to keep their amenities current. The San Bernardino location now boasts a few modern amenities, including free wireless Internet access, electronic keys and upgraded mattresses.

The hotel also has a kidney-shaped swimming pool, an outdoor barbecue grill area and a grassy area ideal for playing and picnicking.

The motel has been portrayed in some movies and video games, its owners say. Images of the motel are familiar to fans of the Disney Pixar movie “Cars,” which includes scenes at the Cozy Cone Motel, which is a blend of the Wigwam Motel and two other locations. A likeness of the motel also is seen in the Rockstar game “GTA San Andreas.”

http://www.pe. com/localnews/ inland/stories/ PE_News_Local_ N_nhistory24. 454d74f.html

FELLSMERE – Local tribes began burying their dead along this part of the St. Johns River about 7,000 years ago, and for several millennia left behind animal bones, clam shells, broken pottery, tools and arrowheads.

Now, at least three areas of concentrated remains are within a tract that spans 15 square miles west of the farm community of Fellsmere. The land, about an hour’s drive south of Orlando, is the future site of a vast reservoir to hold agricultural drainage as part of a $100 million environmental project.

Florida’s Miccosukee and Seminole tribes are appalled. They want the sacred and prehistoric sites kept above water and protected.

“You probably have ancestors that are buried somewhere in a cemetery, and if somebody came in and said, “I’m going to put a levee around your cemetery and use your cemetery so a farmer could dump his pollution, it would just be ridiculous,” said Fred Dayhoff, a former federal park ranger who represents the Miccosukee Tribe on archaeological matters. “We can’t see putting a storm-water sewer-treatment system right on top of an ancient burial.”

The fate of any ancient burial mound — or midden — in Florida is a very sensitive matter to the modern tribes. State and federal agencies deem the Miccosukees and Seminoles the guardians of such remains, a responsibility the two tribes consider a cultural and ancestral duty.

Tribal representatives rarely acknowledge publicly the location or contents of mounds, knowing and despising that grave robbers and artifact hunters have desecrated other burial sites.

Archaeologists estimate that there are hundreds of middens in Florida, many of them small and undiscovered but also some large ones uncovered by a developer’s bulldozer.

Damage to repair

The issue of what to do about the three mounds not far from Fellsmere has been swept up by the state’s pursuit of two pressing goals: repairing environmentally damaged waterways and securing new sources of drinking water for future population growth.

The St. Johns River is at the heart of both objectives in Central and North Florida. The north-flowing river bares the scars of extensive ecosystem damage, and counties and communities in the region have targeted it as a future water supply now that the state’s primary water source, the Floridan Aquifer, has been stretched to its limits.

During the 1960s, federal workers ditched and drained many of the wetlands that feed the St. Johns’ headwaters. Much harm was done before the project was abandoned. Since then, an ongoing restoration has been rendering the headwaters region into a mosaic of marshes and reservoirs that, though far from natural, are meant to mimic nature and ensure a reliable flow of water.

Nearly every bit of the watery landscape, which extends over hundreds of thousands of acres from south of Yeehaw Junction to almost east of Orlando, is regulated by levees, dams, pumps and canals.

An agency at the forefront of the resuscitation, the St. Johns River Water Management District, began developing in 2001 a piece of the restoration mosaic that eventually evolved into a 10,000-acre reservoir meant to keep dirty citrus-grove water from getting into the river.

Caught by surprise

Early on, the district informed state archaeologists, who concurred that flooding the remains would be appropriate, as it would thwart pillaging and retard any decay of artifacts. But after several project delays, federal officials weighed in on the issue and learned that the tribes opposed inundating burial mounds.

“That caught us a bit by surprise,” said Jeff Elledge, the management district’s director of water resources.

During the past century, the mounds have been disturbed by tractors, cattle and canal construction, so that now they are only a few feet high. But they extend many feet into the ground and dozens of yards across. And they contain a “tremendous amount” of artifacts, said Jeff Gardner, a senior archaeologist with Brockington and Associates.

In 2007, Gardner’s Georgia company probed two of the mounds and found no intact skeletons. Workers did encounter dense layers of fragments that included human fingers and toes, and bones of animals, from mice to deer.

To tribal representatives, the mounds don’t simply contain sacred items that can be dug up and moved; rather, the mounds themselves are sacred in their entirety.

According to Willard Steele, a Seminole tribe historic-preservati on officer, middens are regarded as the places from which spirits come and go. Water, according to widely shared beliefs, is a barrier to that movement, which is a key reason why tribes don’t want mounds submerged, he said.

It’s not the only archaeological site located in the midst of environmental projects. Not far down the St. Johns River is a 14,000-acre reservoir project managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where early surveys found relics of ancient living places. In the Everglades, the South Florida Water Management District has constructed double-levee systems to protect three burial mounds.

But the remains near Fellsmere are testing the trust and patience of all involved, in part because so much of the project was completed before the tribes were approached by federal authorities. State and federal laws require that tribes be consulted, but there’s very little in the laws that say specifically what to do.

“This is as much an art as a science,” said Jeff Collins, acting chief of the Army Corps’ permitting unit in Jacksonville.

He and state officials say the tribes will be heard.

“We take their recommendations very seriously,” said state archaeologist Ryan Wheeler in Tallahassee.

Among the options being discussed, none is considered desirable by all parties. They include raising the mounds’ elevations, capping them with additional soil, building berms around them, or redesigning the reservoir to avoid the sites. Moving the remains may be the most likely, but least-liked, outcome.

Either side can go to court in search of a solution. But the tribes can also turn to an even higher authority should the water district do a poor job with the remains.

“The burden is on you,” said Dayhoff, speaking of water-district officials, “because, if there is a guiding spirit above all of us and he thinks you did wrong, well, you’re the one who did wrong.”

http://www.orlandos entinel.com/ news/local/ os-burial- ground-vs- river-restoratio n-20100124, 0,292113. story

January 25, 2010

•  
• A woodcarver and astronomy fanatic for most of his life, Kirt Grayson alternates between carving and manipulating images from the Hubble Space Telescope to artworks.

ASHEVILLE ‚Äî Don’t call painter, woodcarver and astronomy fanatic Kirt Grayson talented. He won’t accept the compliment.

Only 10 percent of each of his genre-hopping works is forged from talent; the rest is the result of dedication and patience, he said, standing among his carved figures of animals and humans, bowls and furniture in the studio in his Asheville home.

It’s a statement inspired by one of his heroes, Albert Einstein, whom he met as a teenager in rural New Jersey while apprenticing with Ben Shahn, a painter and muralist.

Grayson would mix paints for Shahn, and he was in the studio the day Shahn was sketching Einstein for a project.

After shaking his hand, Einstein asked Grayson if he wanted to be an artist when he grew up. He said he hoped to be, and Einstein suggested that to succeed, he needed to apply 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration to everything he did.

Grayson did end up being an artist, among other things. His schooling focused on electrical engineering — and he worked in that field professionally before retiring — but he never abandoned his childhood interests.

Lifelong fascination

His passion for woodcarving also began in his hometown near Princeton, N.J., when he “used to see this man carving, and it was really interesting, ” said Grayson, who’s been carving for more than 50 years and has taught classes on the subject on the Cherokee Indian reservation.

But just as he was fascinated by his woodcarver friend’s skills during the day, he turned his intense curiosity on the cosmic wonders of the night sky.

“As a young boy, I was always fascinated by the skies,” Grayson said. “My father purchased an inexpensive telescope for my 12th birthday. ‚Ķ I can remember spending many nights out in the back of our rural New Jersey home, peering through the telescope in awe of the vastness of our universe and dreaming of finding new worlds.”

About to celebrate his 76th birthday in February, Grayson continues to explore “new worlds.” But these days, the images of these worlds are brought to him by way of a much more expensive tool: NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

He’s taking the Hubble’s images of galaxies, nebulae and planets light-years away from Earth, enhancing them digitally and printing them on poster-quality paper. In some cases, he’s adding other images to these slices of the universe, like a portrait of Einstein. He’s sent these renderings to schools and companies, as well as back to NASA.

“I want the taxpayers to appreciate what these rocket scientists have done for us,” he said. “It’s a gift to the people of the United States and the world.”

Not slowing down

The images come to Grayson as transparencies. In the 1960s, when he was working in California, he volunteered at the Lick Observatory.

“I volunteered to help conduct a survey of the skies, by taking sets of photographic transparencies, ” he said.

And as his wife, Joan, points out, he did this work without the advantages of modern-day technology, accomplishing the survey through a very tedious process.

“He’s so happy doing this work,” Joan said. “I’m so proud of him.”

His photo enhancements of Hubble telescope images and his woodcarving interests don’t compete, he said. When he wakes up each morning, his mood dictates whether he’ll sit down in front of his computer or pick up his carving tools.

One thing is for certain: He’ll be doing something.

“I’m going to do to this until they have to carry me out of the studio,” he said.

http://www.citizen- times.com/ apps/pbcs. dll/article? AID=201030125000 6

January 25, 2010

•  
• A woodcarver and astronomy fanatic for most of his life, Kirt Grayson alternates between carving and manipulating images from the Hubble Space Telescope to artworks.

ASHEVILLE ‚Äî Don’t call painter, woodcarver and astronomy fanatic Kirt Grayson talented. He won’t accept the compliment.

Only 10 percent of each of his genre-hopping works is forged from talent; the rest is the result of dedication and patience, he said, standing among his carved figures of animals and humans, bowls and furniture in the studio in his Asheville home.

It’s a statement inspired by one of his heroes, Albert Einstein, whom he met as a teenager in rural New Jersey while apprenticing with Ben Shahn, a painter and muralist.

Grayson would mix paints for Shahn, and he was in the studio the day Shahn was sketching Einstein for a project.

After shaking his hand, Einstein asked Grayson if he wanted to be an artist when he grew up. He said he hoped to be, and Einstein suggested that to succeed, he needed to apply 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration to everything he did.

Grayson did end up being an artist, among other things. His schooling focused on electrical engineering — and he worked in that field professionally before retiring — but he never abandoned his childhood interests.

Lifelong fascination

His passion for woodcarving also began in his hometown near Princeton, N.J., when he “used to see this man carving, and it was really interesting, ” said Grayson, who’s been carving for more than 50 years and has taught classes on the subject on the Cherokee Indian reservation.

But just as he was fascinated by his woodcarver friend’s skills during the day, he turned his intense curiosity on the cosmic wonders of the night sky.

“As a young boy, I was always fascinated by the skies,” Grayson said. “My father purchased an inexpensive telescope for my 12th birthday. ‚Ķ I can remember spending many nights out in the back of our rural New Jersey home, peering through the telescope in awe of the vastness of our universe and dreaming of finding new worlds.”

About to celebrate his 76th birthday in February, Grayson continues to explore “new worlds.” But these days, the images of these worlds are brought to him by way of a much more expensive tool: NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

He’s taking the Hubble’s images of galaxies, nebulae and planets light-years away from Earth, enhancing them digitally and printing them on poster-quality paper. In some cases, he’s adding other images to these slices of the universe, like a portrait of Einstein. He’s sent these renderings to schools and companies, as well as back to NASA.

“I want the taxpayers to appreciate what these rocket scientists have done for us,” he said. “It’s a gift to the people of the United States and the world.”

Not slowing down

The images come to Grayson as transparencies. In the 1960s, when he was working in California, he volunteered at the Lick Observatory.

“I volunteered to help conduct a survey of the skies, by taking sets of photographic transparencies, ” he said.

And as his wife, Joan, points out, he did this work without the advantages of modern-day technology, accomplishing the survey through a very tedious process.

“He’s so happy doing this work,” Joan said. “I’m so proud of him.”

His photo enhancements of Hubble telescope images and his woodcarving interests don’t compete, he said. When he wakes up each morning, his mood dictates whether he’ll sit down in front of his computer or pick up his carving tools.

One thing is for certain: He’ll be doing something.

“I’m going to do to this until they have to carry me out of the studio,” he said.

http://www.citizen- times.com/ apps/pbcs. dll/article? AID=201030125000 6

January 22, 2010

ST. LOUIS (AP) — U.S. military veterans are sorting through a massive government archaeological collection that has been neglected for decades, with the hope of archiving the stone tools, arrows and American Indian beads that were found beneath major public works projects.

The collection dates to the 1930s, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers started building dozens of locks, dams and reservoirs, and the ground beneath them was excavated for archaeological treasures.

Prehistoric and historic pottery, stone tools, arrowheads, Indian beads, necklaces, earrings and ear spools, and ceremonial artifacts, even human remains, were collected. The items then sat in boxes and paper bags in university museums as well as private basements, garages and tool sheds.

In recent weeks, U.S. veterans — many with traumatic brain injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder — have begun processing, cataloguing, digitizing and archiving the collection as part of a one-year $3.5 million project, funded with federal stimulus money.

It’s part of the corps’ effort to find American Indian cultural items and return them to tribes or their descendants ‚Äî something all federal agencies must do under a 1990 law. Michael Trimble, chief of curation and archives for the corps’ St. Louis district, said the goal is to get the collection catalogued, digitally photographed and put on the Web for public viewing.

He said the corps’ 47,000-cubic- feet collection of boxed artifacts and associated records, audio tapes and photographs would fill 30 semitrailers.

Trimble, who helped excavate mass graves in Iraq from 2004 to 2007 and testified in the genocide case against Saddam Hussein, said it was a friend who helped him understand he could both help veterans and apply their discipline to the care of the artifacts. He and his staff then applied for the federal funding.

Veterans say the project is providing them with hope and new job skills.

“This is the best thing that has happened to me since I got out of the military,” said Cody Gregory, a Burleson, Texas, native who works at the Veterans Curation Project’s St. Louis center, which opened in December.

Gregory, 27, a former U.S. Air Force mental health tech in Afghanistan, works with a dozen other Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam-era veterans at the St. Louis site. The project’s two other centers ‚Äî one that opened in October in Augusta, Ga., and one set to open Monday in Washington, D.C. ‚Äî employ the same number of veterans.

Brockington Cultural Resources Consulting in suburban Atlanta runs the three centers for the corps and trains the veterans.

Cathy van Arsdale, who manages all three sites, said the project trains and employs veterans in records and data management and archiving. Veterans hold the jobs for six months, then work with the Veterans Administration to find permanent jobs.

Matt Bahr, 28, of Ste. Genevieve, said the job working on the archaeological collection allows him to apply the quick thinking and cognitive skills he learned as an Air Force flight nurse in Iraq.

“We have millions of dollars invested in our training that would be wasted if we sat at home,” he said of veterans. “I may not save lives again, but I can do this.”

Wearing white gloves, Bahr on Friday carefully handled field maps, drawings, photographs and other delicate specimens that told the story of a 1970s dig in Indiana conducted by university students.

Their notes, written on creased loose-leaf paper, with now-peeling tape, were held in a box that was water-damaged and moldy.

Trimble said the veterans are close and talk to each other.

“They’ve all been through the same stuff,” he said. “The work is therapy.”

http://www.victoria advocate. com/news/ 2010/jan/ 22/bc-us- veterans- archaeology2nd- ld-writethru/ ?business&texas

January 29, 2010

The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) President Keel will deliver the 9th annual State of Indian Nations address on Friday, January 29, 2010 from the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The speech will coincide with President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.

WHO: NCAI President Jefferson Keel

WHAT: State of Indian Nations Address

WHEN: Friday, January 29, 2010, 9:30 a.m. EST

WHERE: National Press Club – Ballroom, 14th & F Streets, NW, Washington, DC

For more information or to RSVP, contact Annarae Steele at asteele@ncai. org

Founded in 1944, the National Congress of American Indians is the oldest, largest and most representative American Indian and Alaska Native organization in the country. NCAI advocates on behalf of tribal governments, promoting strong tribal-federal government-to- government policies, and promoting a better understanding among the general public regarding American Indian and Alaska Native governments, people and rights.

SOURCE National Congress of Amercian Indians

Published Jan. 21, 2010

http://ca.sys- con.com/node/ 1256149

Jan. 23, 2010

A rendering of the resort and casino the Tohono O’odham Nation wants to build near 95th and Northern avenues in Glendale.

A southern Arizona tribe responded Friday to the governor, saying it will not back away from plans to build a resort and casino near Glendale’s sports and entertainment district.

The Tohono O’odham Nation is waiting for a federal response to its year-old request to take 135 acres of tribal-purchased land into the reservation system.

In a letter to Gov. Jan Brewer, Chairman Ned Norris Jr. declined to withdraw the tribe’s application as the governor requested earlier this week. He asked for a meeting to discuss the issue, which he called an economic benefit to the state in fiscally dire times.

“We are on the same team, and we all want a better tomorrow for Arizona,” Norris said.

Governor’s Office press secretary Paul Senseman said Brewer “stands firm that this location should no longer be considered.”

Senseman said earlier in the week that Brewer, at this point, did not intend to threaten legal action. He said Friday that she was weighing her next move. The governor will meet with the tribal chairman, he said, but consensus is difficult with the pending reservation application and a legal battle with Glendale over the property.

Senseman said the time for positive discussion would have been in 2003 when the tribe purchased the land, instead of reaching out as the application was being filed in January 2009.

The governor waded into the issue Tuesday with a letter to Norris that said the proposed casino backtracked on assurances to voters that gaming would not become part of “off-reservation neighborhoods. “

She said people believed when approving Proposition 202 that gaming would not be able to expand beyond existing reservations.

Brewer also cited concerns that the casino would intrude on other tribes’ gaming markets and that people were nervous the federal government would approve the application without local input.

The majority of Glendale officials oppose the plan, which would remove land from the city’s planning area. A high school also is near the site, which is between 91st and 95th avenues between Northern and Glendale avenues.

Norris said claims of nervousness are “disingenuous. “

His letter said, “For the past 358 days, we have stood ready to meet and discuss this project with any and all interested parties.”

He said the last time Glendale agreed to meet was in April 2009.

Glendale City Attorney Craig Tindall said dialogue has not happened because the tribe has failed to provide detailed economic studies or site plans requested by the city.

Responding to the governor’s concerns about state gaming compacts, Norris pointed out that the compact allows his tribe to add another casino.

He also cited a May 2009 letter from Paula Hart, acting director for the Office of Indian Gaming with the U.S. Department of Interior, that noted Arizona’s compact does, under certain circumstances, allow for gaming on newly acquired land.

The tribe’s request to take the Valley property into its reservation stems from a federal settlement to replace tribal land near Gila Bend that was damaged decades ago by a federally built dam and which forced the relocation of tribal members.

Norris told Brewer in his letter that the Tohono O’odham Nation is “no stranger to these injustices” of broken promises, forced relocations and lost natural resources.

“With all due respect, we will not be relocated again,” he said.

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