Native Americans

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Parole Denied for Native American Activist Convicted in 1975 Killings

      by

      Supporters say Leonard Peltier, 79, was unfairly blamed for the deaths of two F.B.I. agents in a shootout with activists.A Native American activist who was convicted of killing two federal agents nearly 50 years ago has once again been denied parole, the U.S. Parole Commission announced on Tuesday. The decision came despite decades of complaints from supporters that the activist, Leonard Peltier, did not get a fair trial and was unjustly convicted.Mr. Peltier, 79, was given two life sentences for his role in a shootout between activists and F.B.I. agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975 that left two agents and an activist dead. His health has greatly declined in recent years, after multiple bouts of Covid-19, a stroke and an aortic aneurysm.Mr. Peltier’s supporters — who over the years have come to include members of Congress, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, former members of the prosecution and the judge who originally sentenced him — say that F.B.I. agents coerced witnesses in the case and that prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence.“Obviously, they deserve justice,” James Mazzola, deputy director of research at Amnesty International USA, said of the families of the federal agents who were killed. But keeping Mr. Peltier in prison, he said, “is not justice.”Supporters of Mr. Peltier have tried repeatedly over the years to win his release through parole or through a presidential pardon or commutation of his sentence.In a letter to the Justice Department in 2022, Christopher Wray, director of the F.B.I., firmly opposed granting Mr. Peltier clemency.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Native tribes on banning Kristi Noem from reservations: ‘She’d be charged with trespassing’

      by

      While sifting through his work emails one February afternoon, Clyde Estes saw a message that dismayed him.“I started reading it and was just shocked,” recalled Estes, chairman of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. “It’s something you don’t expect to see.”It relayed what Kristi Noem said at the state legislature just a few days prior. In her address at the state capitol, the second-term South Dakota governor blasted US immigration policy, saying that “invasion is coming over the southern border”. In that same speech, Noem pronounced: “Make no mistake, the cartels have a presence on several of South Dakota’s tribal reservations.”Noem alleged that tribal leaders in South Dakota were profiting off drug cartel activity. These remarks, and her controversial comments about Native children, have been met with staunch condemnation from Indigenous leaders, and have dredged up a bitter history between the tribes and the state.As a result, all nine of South Dakota’s federally recognized tribes, which cover more than 12% of the state, have now banned Noem from their reservations.After initially deciding against banning Noem in April, the tribal leaders of Lower Brule Sioux voted in May to go ahead. “There were a couple of fellow tribal council members who wanted an apology first, so we were holding out hope and got no reply from her at all,” said Estes.If the governor attempts to enter the reservation, Estes said that tribal law enforcement would notify county sheriffs and ask her to voluntarily leave the reservation.“She would be charged with trespassing,” said Estes, calling the situation “very, very unfortunate”.“We’re going to stand up to defend our people.”A vocal ally of Donald Trump, Noem was once considered a possible pick for Trump’s vice-presidential running mate. But her path to that role now seems more complicated following her revelation in her recent memoir that she killed her dog. Some see Noem’s focus on reservations as a political tactic.“She’s clearly trying to raise her profile as somebody who’s tough on the border, tough on crime,” said Chase Iron Eyes, a Lakota activist and attorney who is a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. “She’s trying to use tribal nations as ploys for her political ambition.”The Oglala Sioux were the first tribe to ban Noem in 2019, the same year she began serving as South Dakota governor. Many tribes in the state, including the Oglala Sioux, had protested against the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, a controversial project that would transport oil from Canada to the United States while crossing major waterways that Indigenous tribes in South and North Dakota rely on. The protests, largely led by Native Americans, resulted in 761 arrests in a six-month period.Noem subsequently signed anti-riot legislation aimed to quash public protest, although it was later blocked. The Oglala Sioux Tribe said it felt targeted by the new law and it was “particularly offended” that Noem consulted with the pipeline company rather than the tribes.In February this year, the Oglala Sioux reissued a ban following her recent comments linking drug cartels to tribes in South Dakota. In March, Noem accused tribal leaders of “personally benefiting” from cartels.“If she claims to have evidence of tribal leadership involved in cartel activity, then make that evidence known,” said Iron Eyes.“None of the council or myself are aware of any relationship with any cartel,” said Estes.Frank Star Comes Out, president of the Oglala Sioux, has stated in the past that he believes cartels are active on tribal land. But tribes object to Noem’s suggestion that they are tied to the cartels – and say instead that the government is failing in its historic obligation to help tribes battle crime.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Standing Rock Sioux, for instance, say tribes “ceded vast lands and resources” to the US in the 19th century in exchange for help providing law enforcement, among other things. Today, however, “on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, seven police officers patrol an area the size of two small states and serve a community of more than 12,000 tribal members and residents, needing at least 20 more officers to be fully staffed,” a tribal spokesperson said in a statement.Noem did not respond to questions about these issues from the Guardian, but her spokesperson shared a recording of a May press conference in which she said, in part: “Instead of working with me, many of them [tribes] have chosen to banish me, and I will ask them right back, why have they not banished the cartels? Why have they focused their attention on me, who has only offered them help, and not gone after those who are perpetuating violence against their own people?”She says the help she has offered includes a law enforcement course designed to train tribal officers and a law enforcement summit next week. The governor has also asked for audits of all federal funds given to South Dakota’s tribes to “verify the need for additional law enforcement resources”.‘Attacking Native children is wrong’Noem has criticized tribes on other fronts. “Not only is she impugning the reputations of tribal council members and elected leadership, she says that Native children are hopeless,” said Estes.In remarks during a March town hall in Mitchell, South Dakota, Noem alleged that Native children “don’t have any hope”, in the context of commenting on limited access to education and jobs on reservations. She added: “They don’t have parents who show up and help them.”For some, Noem’s comments about Native American children touch on a fraught history.Thirty federal boarding schools operated in South Dakota between 1819 and 1969 that separated Native children from their parents, forced cultural assimilation and punished kids for speaking Indigenous languages.“My mom went to one of these boarding schools. A lot of abuse took place there, a lot of forced removal of children,” said Iron Eyes. “In South Dakota, boarding school was a euphemism for a place where they erase who you are as a Native person.”The South Dakota governor has since doubled down on her comments about cartels on tribal lands on social media.“Instead of apologizing, she seems to be convincing herself that what she’s doing is not wrong,” said Chase Iron Eyes. “That attacking Native children is not wrong, saying they’re hopeless is not wrong.”There have been no publicly reported accounts of Noem attempting to enter reservations, which have their own law enforcement, in the wake of the bans. When asked what state police would do in such a situation, a South Dakota highway patrol spokesperson said: “We decline to answer a hypothetical question.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Judge Orders Rail Operator to Pay $400 Million to Tribe for Trespassing

      by

      BNSF Railway broke its agreement with the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community when it ran hundreds of train cars a week containing crude oil through the tribe’s land in Washington State, according to a federal judge.A judge has ordered a railway company to pay nearly $400 million for trespassing on Native American land by far exceeding the number of train cars carrying crude oil that it was allowed to run through a tribe’s land, according to documents filed Monday in federal court in Washington State.According to the documents, filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle, the company, BNSF Railway — which operates one of the largest railroad networks in North America — committed “willful, conscious and knowing trespass” when it ran several 100-car trains carrying crude oil every week through the Swinomish Reservation, which spans about 15 square miles on Fidalgo Island in the western part of the state.Under an agreement between the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community and the rail company, one eastern-bound train, and one western-bound train, of 25 cars or less, were allowed to pass through the tribe’s land each day. But from September 2012 to May 2021, BNSF exceeded that allowance, with at least six 100-car trains traveling in each direction per week, according to a 2015 lawsuit filed by the tribe.Each week, the trains passed through the far north end of the tribe’s land, near a casino, gas station, convenience store and R.V. park, lawyers for the tribe said in the suit. They noted that crude oil, notoriously dangerous cargo, had resulted in derailments, deadly explosions and spills, as well as environmental contamination. BNSF ignored repeated demands by the tribe to cease its “unauthorized use,” according to the suit, and said it would continue running the same number of trains through Swinomish land. In a trial earlier this month, it was determined that the rail company had “breached the contractual obligations” of its agreement with the tribe, and that it should be stripped of the net profits gained through its unauthorized use of Swinomish land, Judge Robert S. Lasnik said in court documents that were filed Monday.In an email on Monday, BNSF refused to comment on the case, and lawyers representing the company did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Steve Edwards, the chairman of the tribe, said in a statement on Monday that the group was thankful that Judge Lasnik had ruled in its favor. He noted that the large sum the judge had ordered the rail company to pay reflected the “enormous wrongful profits that BNSF gained by using the tribe’s land day after day, week after week, year after year over our objections.”“This land is what we have,” Mr. Edwards said. “We have always protected it, and we always will.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Kristi Noem banned from seven Native American reservations in her own state

      by

      The governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, is no longer allowed to step foot on large swaths of her state after another Native American tribe banished her from its reservation in response to comments she made about tribal leaders benefiting from drug cartels.The Crow Creek Sioux Tribe on Tuesday confirmed that the tribe had voted to ban the Republican governor from its reservation in central South Dakota. It is the latest development in a widening rupture between Native American tribes in South Dakota and the state’s governor.Noem, an ally of Donald Trump, has embraced his hardline rhetoric on immigration and in recent months has repeatedly linked drug cartels with crime on the reservations in the state.“We do not have cartels on the reservations,” the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe chairman, Peter Lengkeek, told NPR following Tuesday’s vote.“We have cartel products, like guns and drugs. But they pass over state highways getting to the reservation,” he continued. “So, putting us all together like that and saying that all tribes are involved in this really shows … the ignorance of the governor’s office.”The action comes a week after the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe voted to banish the governor and the Yankton Sioux Tribe recommended a ban against Noem. The governor is now unwelcome on seven of the nine reservations located in South Dakota, amounting to roughly one-fifth of state territory.“Banishing Governor Noem does nothing to solve the problem,” a spokesperson for the governor’s office said in a statement. “She calls on all our tribal leaders to banish the cartels from tribal lands.”In a social media post last week, Noem implored tribes to partner with her office to help “restore law and order” on tribal land and blamed the situation on the Biden administration’s failure to address migration at the southern border.In statements, several tribal members have accused Noem, once considered a potential running mate for Trump, of political opportunism and called her comments disrespectful and dangerous.“Our people are being used for her political gain,” the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Frank Star Comes Out, recently told the Associated Press.This is not the governor’s first clash with some of the tribes in her state. She was previously banned by the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council after she backed anti-riot legislation in response to the 2016 Dakota Access pipeline protests and again during the Covid-19 pandemic when some tribes implemented checkpoints to control the spread of the disease on their reservations.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This decision does not come after one or two incidents but after years of witnessing the governor’s harmful and aggressive actions against tribes,” members of the Yankton Sioux Tribe’s business and claims committee said, announcing their support for banning Noem, whom they called “anti-tribe”.The controversy comes as Noem, once considered a vice-presidential contender, reels from revelations in her memoir No Going Back that she shot and killed her family dog, Cricket, after it misbehaved after a pheasant-hunting trip. Facing bipartisan blowback over her actions, and withering ridicule, Noem defended her actions on a book tour, arguing that the dog had shown threatening behavior and needed to be put down.She was also forced to remove an anecdote from the book in which she claims to have met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, after experts disputed the claim. More

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      How Wild Rice Forecasts Climate Change

      by

      Manoomin, a crop vital to the Indigenous peoples of the Upper Midwest, has been threatened in recent years. But careful stewardship is helping to bring it back.Dwayne Jarman is often tinkering with the wild rice machines in his garage in this tree-lined suburb of Detroit. He has threshers to crack the hulls and winnowers to blow the chaff. He smiles and flips the switch. It’s time to process last summer’s harvest from his Anishinaabe homeland near Traverse City in Northern Michigan.“I want to do the rice all year round because I’m trying to reconnect to the things that matter,” said Mr. Jarman, a veterinarian. When he’s not working his day job, he harvests hundreds of pounds of rice, which he shares with friends and family. For him, harvesting and processing the rice is not only a labor of love, but also a preservation of an Indigenous food under constant environmental stress.Recipe: Wild Rice PorridgeClimate change and human impact have significantly depleted the natural abundance of manoomin, the “good berry” as wild rice is known in Anishinaabemowin, an Indigenous language also known as Ojibwe, and protecting it is synonymous with preserving cultural identity.Wild rice is sacred and central to the creation story of the Anishinaabeg, a vast cultural and linguistic collective that includes the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi. Under an ancient prophecy known as the Seven Fires, the ancestors left their Atlantic Coast homeland and migrated westward to the “land where food grows on water.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Widening Racial Disparities Underlie Rise in Child Deaths in the U.S.

      by

      New research finds that the death rate among Black youths soared by 37 percent, and among Native American youths by 22 percent, between 2014 and 2020, compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.The NewsThanks to advancements in medicine and insurance, mortality rates for children in the United States had been shrinking for decades. But last year, researchers uncovered a worrisome reversal: The child death rate was rising.Now, they have taken their analysis a step further. A new study, published Saturday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed growing disparities in child death rates across racial and ethnic groups. Black and Native American youths ages 1 to 19 died at significantly higher rates than white youths — predominantly from injuries such as car accidents, homicides and suicides.Dr. Coleen Cunningham, chair of pediatrics at the University of California, Irvine, and the pediatrician in chief at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, who was not involved in the study, said the detailed analysis of the disparities documented “a sad and growing American tragedy.”“Almost all are preventable,” she said, “if we make it a priority.”Flowers for Karon Blake, 13, who was shot and killed in Washington, D.C., in January 2023. Gun-related deaths were two to four times higher among Black and Native American youth than among white youth.Carolyn Kaster/Associated PressSome Context: A frightening trend examined more closely.Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Children’s Hospital of Richmond had previously revealed that mortality rates among children and adolescents had risen by 18 percent between 2019 and 2021. Deaths related to injuries had grown so dramatically that they eclipsed all public health gains.The group, seeking to drill deeper into the worrying trend, obtained death certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public WONDER database and stratified it by race, ethnicity and cause for children ages 1 to 19. They found that Black and American Indian/Alaska Native children were not only dying at significantly higher rates than white children but that the disparities — which had been improving until 2013 — were widening.The data also revealed that while the mortality rates for children overall took a turn for the worse around 2020, the rates for Black, Native American and Hispanic children had begun increasing much earlier, around 2014.Between 2014 and 2020, the death rates for Black children and teenagers rose by about 37 percent, and for Native American youths by about by about 22 percent — compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.“We knew we would find disparities, but certainly not this large,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine at the V.C.U. School of Medicine, who worked on the research. “We were shocked.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Jeffrey Gibson: Representing the U.S., and Critiquing It, in a Psychedelic Rainbow

      by

      People in Venice might hear the jingle dress dancers before they see them. On April 18, some 26 intertribal Native American dancers and singers from Oklahoma and Colorado will make their way through the winding streets and canals of the Italian city. Wearing brightly colored shawls, beaded yokes and dresses decorated with the metal cones that give the dance its distinctive cshh cshh rattling sound, they’ll make their way to the Giardini, one of the primary sites of the Venice Biennale. There, they’ll climb atop and surround a large red sculpture composed of pedestals of different heights and perform.The jingle dress dance, which originated with the Ojibwe people of North America in the early 20th century, typically takes place at powwows. In Venice, it will inaugurate the exhibition in the United States Pavilion on April 20. Titled “the space in which to place me,” the show is a mini-survey of the rapturous art of the queer Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson. Flags, paintings, sculptures and a video envelop and fill the stately building with proliferating geometric patterns, intricate beadwork, evocative text, a psychedelic overdose of color and political references to Indigenous and broader American histories.“How do I relate to the United States?” mused Gibson, 52, who in conversation slips effortlessly between earnestness and flashes of playful, dry wit. It was late December, and we were sitting in a room in his upstate New York studio whose nondescript furniture was dotted with evidence of ongoing work on Venice: a maquette here, paint samples there, a test flag folded loosely in a chair. The deadline for finishing nearly two dozen artworks was about a month away, but Gibson was calm — at least outwardly so — as he showed me images and the pieces in progress.“I have a complicated relationship with the United States,” he said. His ancestors were among the Native Americans forcibly displaced by the federal government. Both his parents came from poverty and went to boarding schools, where Native children were frequently abused. As his studio manager zoomed in on a digital image of a painting, I could see a large block of text surrounded by angular, radiating lines. Gibson read the title: “The returned male student far too frequently goes back to the reservation and falls into the old custom of letting his hair grow long.”The chilling line came from a 1902 letter written by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to a school superintendent in California about the need to assimilate Native students returning home from boarding schools. Once he found it, Gibson decided that all three busts he was working on for the Biennale should have prominent hair: a beaded mullet; long, flowing locks made from ribbon; and an elaborately-styled shawl-fringe “do.” The choice represents one of his artistic strengths: taking a point of pain and turning it into a kind of celebration, without losing its critical edge.Installation view of Gibson’s works at the U.S. Pavilion, from left: “The Returned Male Student Far Too Frequently Goes Back to the Reservation and Falls Into the Old Custom of Letting His Hair Grow Long,” which references a letter by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs; “I’m a Natural Man”: “Liberty, When It Begins to Take Root, Is a Plant of Rapid Growth,” which cites a letter from George Washington to James Madison.Brian BarlowWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Kristi Noem, South Dakota Governor and Trump VP Contender, Is Barred by Tribes

      by

      Four of South Dakota’s federally recognized Native American tribes have barred the state’s governor, Kristi Noem — a Republican whose name has been floated as a potential running mate for former President Donald J. Trump — from their reservations. The latest blocked Ms. Noem on Thursday.Three of the tribes barred Ms. Noem this month, joining another tribe that had sanctioned the governor after she told state lawmakers in February that Mexican drug cartels had a foothold on their reservations and were committing murders there.Ms. Noem further angered the tribes with remarks she made at a town hall event last month in Winner, S.D., appearing to suggest that the tribes were complicit in the cartels’ presence on their reservations.“We’ve got some tribal leaders that I believe are personally benefiting from the cartels being there, and that’s why they attack me every day,” Ms. Noem said.The tribes are the Cheyenne River Sioux, the Rosebud Sioux and the Standing Rock Sioux and the Oglala Sioux, which in February became the first group to bar Ms. Noem from its reservation. Their reservations have a combined population of nearly 50,000 people and encompass more than eight million acres, according to state and federal government counts. Standing Rock Indian Reservation, the third tribal area to have restricted Ms. Noem’s access, extends into North Dakota.The tribes have accused Ms. Noem of stoking fears and denigrating their heritage when she referred to a gang known as the Ghost Dancers while addressing state lawmakers and said that it had recruited tribal members to join its criminal activities.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More