Native American Tribes Sue US Treasury Over Distribution of Stimulus Aid

Native American tribes are among the communities who have been suffering the most from the coronavirus, and receiving the least amount of aid. Native Americans are a high-risk population for COVID-19. According to Health Affairs—a peer-reviewed healthcare journal—heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, and diabetes are the leading causes of death among Native American populations, which means that life expectancy is 5.5 years less than the rest of the US population.

The coronavirus has highlighted the disparities that Native American communities face, even under “normal” circumstances. According to the American Bar Association, “health care for Native Americans lags behind other groups, despite a legal obligation on the part of the United States to provide health care to American Indians and Alaska Natives.”

In mid-March, the Seattle Indian Health Board reported that instead of receiving the medical supplies they asked for, they received a box of body bags. Though it was determined to be a mistake, the mix-up echoes the pressing lack of resources and funding that the Native American communities need. As the coronavirus continues to devastate vulnerable communities in the US, it is of the utmost importance that stimulus aid goes directly to individuals, not corporations.

The Navajo Nation, the second largest Native American tribe, now has the highest per-capita COVID-19 infection rate after New York and New Jersey. As of May 9, there were 2,973 confirmed cases and 98 confirmed deaths for the Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation with a population of 350,000 residents, and it continues to rise. On May 6, the Nation finally received their portion of the federal coronavirus stimulus aid, six weeks after it was promised to them, and only after the US Treasury Department was sued.

In April, a group of Native American tribal governments sued the US Treasury Department over unjust distribution of coronavirus stimulus aid. They sued the Treasury in order to prevent the agency from allowing for-profit Alaska Native Corporations (ANCs) to access the $8 billion allocated to Native American tribes from the $2.2 trillion emergency stimulus rescue package.

The ANCs were established after the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) in 1971—a law governing how Alaska Natives could manage their lands. According to Vox, the passage of the ANCSA was likely because the “ANCSA paved the way for oil and gas exploration, which some ANCs have gone on to profit from in the years since.”

The tribes argue that the aid should not include the for-profit Alaska Native Corporations, and should be distributed solely to the 574 federally recognized tribes. If the 237 ANCs were able to apply for the relief money, it would greatly reduce the amount the nation’s tribal people would receive because the Alaskan Native Corporations would disproportionately benefit. According to Politico, “it could also tilt much of the funding even further toward one state by giving some Alaska Natives the ability to seek aid as both villagers and shareholders of a corporation.”

On May 5, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta gave the tribes a victory when he limited access of the relief aid to the Native American tribes, blocking the ANCs from getting money from the stimulus funds.

Asiya Haouchine

is an Algerian-American writer who graduated from the University of Connecticut in May 2016, earning a BA in journalism and English. She was an editorial intern and contributing writer for Warscapes magazine and the online/blog editor for Long River Review. She is currently studying for her Master’s in Library and Information Science. @AsiyaHaou

Oil Wars: The Significance of Small Battles for Land Rights Against Major Oil Companies

The complexity of the oil industry and the massive influence of big money over environmental and public health decisions often leaves the small battles to be squashed before they have seen the surface. But recent fights over land rights, have led to some large victories. Home owners, environmental groups, and tribes have all made strides against companies in their area; can these local battles gain headway on a national level?

Flag at a protest for the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Becker1999. CC-BY-2.0.

Oil has hit a cornerstone between immense support from Trump’s administration and increasing heat from environmental activists. Often oil companies are in the news when facing massive consequences for oil spills. But, people that live near drilling sites or along pipelines can face health effects and unfair treatment from corporate and government agencies every day.

 The biggest culprits are often in rural areas where people are dependent on the land for their livelihood. For example, a pipeline being built from western Texas to the Gulf cuts straight through Hill Country and the ranches there. This is even true for areas designated as private conservation land that is supposed to be protected from any development. The building raises concerns for environmental, aesthetic, and public health reasons.

 The same problem is found in West Virginia, where pipeline development cuts through private homes. If the owners refuse to sell their land, it can be taken legally through Eminent Domain. This will continue to become more popular in the next 15 years as there is an estimated 26,000 miles of new gas pipelines to be built. People are starting to sue to bring the problem to the Supreme Court. The increased danger of living next to a pipeline can lead to cancer, contaminated drinking water, and increased dangers if the line were to break or become damaged.

 One of the biggest groups fighting against pipelines are native tribes. The Sioux gained attention at Standing Rock while fighting the production of the Dakota Access Pipeline. In the Upper Midwest, rights to Line 5 are being revoked on reservations. In Alaska, Inuit tribes are fighting drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) which has been opened up to drilling for the first time under the Trump administration.

 The ANWR and the Arctic are thought to be some of the largest untapped oil reserves in the world. Climate change has increased access to areas of the region that couldn’t be reached before, yet the environmental risk of drilling and transporting in an extremely unique and fragile ecosystem has led to a lot of resistance. In the ANWR, drilling is thought to upset Caribou migration and breeding grounds, which the local people rely on as a food source and cultural significance.

 In the US, it often seems like these fights always end in the same way, but in Ecuador and Canada tribes have main significant gains against drilling. In the Amazon, the Waorani won a landmark case against the Ecuadorian government that was trying to open the rainforest to mining. The government hoped to bring more cash into the country but would do so at a huge environmental and cultural cost. One that the Waorani wouldn’t allow. The area covered 7 million acres of Indigenous land. The Waorani said that is about more than the land but instead about a way of living that supports the lives of others.

 In Canada, fights against seismic blasts to find offshore oil reserves had great success to protect the local ecosystem. The local Inuit of Clyne River joined with Greenpeace and grassroots environmental movements to bring it to national attention. Now Arctic off-shore blasting has seen its final days. There are great strides to be made by fighting the daily impacts of oil and gas drilling. If anything, increasing drilling and pipeline construction is continuing our dependence on one of the most carbon-dense energy sources in the world.

DEVIN O’DONNELL’s interest in travel was cemented by a multi-month trip to East Africa when she was 19. Since then, she has continued to have immersive experiences on multiple continents. Devin has written for a start-up news site and graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Neuroscience.

Think Confederate Monuments are Racist? Consider Pioneer Monuments

In San Francisco, there is an an 800-ton monument that retells California history, from the Spanish missions to American settlement. Several bronze sculptures and relief plaques depict American Indians, white miners, missionaries and settlers. A female figure symbolizing white culture stands atop a massive stone pillar.

The design of the “pioneer monument” was celebrated in newspapers across the country when it was erected in 1894. Today, however, activists have argued that the monument – particularly its depiction of a Spanish missionary and Mexican “vaquero,” or cowboy, towering over an American Indian – is demeaning to American Indians.

Frank Happersberger’s pioneer monument, San Francisco, California, 1894. Lisa Allen.

Should the city take down part of this 125-year-old monument?

Many cities are removing or reinterpreting their Confederate monuments, with the understanding that they commemorate racism. But few Americans realize that pioneer monuments placed across the country are also racist.

As my research and forthcoming book on pioneer monuments since the 1890s show, most early pioneer statues celebrated whites dominating American Indians.

Confederate and pioneer monuments

Since at least 2015, cities across the United States have debated what to do with more than 700 Confederate monuments.

After the Civil War, grieving widows raised funds to place monuments to soldiers in southern cemeteries. But most statues of Confederate leaders and foot soldiers were put up around 1900 by heritage organizations to honor the “Lost Cause.”

The “Lost Cause” is the idea that that the Civil War began as a heroic defense against northern aggression. In fact, the Civil War was primarily fought to defend slavery.

In the past few years, cities such as New Orleans, Louisiana and Baltimore, Maryland have chosen to remove their Confederate statues. Activists tore down a Confederate soldier statue in Durham, North Carolina last year.

By contrast, there has been far less attention on the roughly 200 pioneer monuments erected for similar reasons around the same time.

The earliest pioneer monuments were put up in midwestern and western cities such as Des Moines, Iowa and San Francisco, California. They date from the 1890s and early 1900s, as whites settled the frontier and pushed American Indians onto reservations.

Those statues showed white men claiming land and building farms and cities in the West. They explicitly celebrated the dominant white view of the Wild West progressing from American Indian “savagery” to white “civilization.”

Deviations from that script produced public controversy. For example, Denver residents in 1907 vocally opposed prominent American sculptor Frederick MacMonnies’s plan for a pioneer monument. MacMonnies proposed a large stone pillar surrounded by bronze hunters, miners and settlers similar to San Francisco’s celebrated monument. MacMonnies’s model included a mounted Plains American Indian warrior atop the pillar to show American Indians yielding to white settlement.

But Denver residents expected the figure at the top of the pillar to represent the pinnacle of progress, like “Eureka,” the female figure representing the spirit of California on San Francisco’s monument.

Denver’s residents argued that the monument needed a white man on top, so MacMonnies revised his design, replacing the American Indian warrior with frontiersman and American Indian fighter Kit Carson, on horseback.

August Leimbach, Madonna of the Trail, Springfield, Ohio, 1928.

By the 1920s, whites controlled most western lands, and they stopped depicting American Indians in their pioneer monuments. New pioneer monuments from Maryland to California focused on western women. Pioneer mothers in sunbonnets stood for white “civilization” winning in the West. And they offered a conservative model of womanhood to contrast flappers wearing short dresses and bobbed hair and women’s growing sexual freedom.

More recent monuments, such as Goodland, Kansas’s “They Came to Stay” and Omaha, Nebraska’s “Pioneer Courage,” do not directly engage racial politics. As their titles suggest, these statues honor pioneer families’ grit, and they teach local history.

But these statues still represent a racist view, ignoring the cost of white settlement on Native lands. Like earlier monuments, they reinforce white dominance and erase ethnic diversity in the American West.

Pioneer monuments today

The recent debate about Confederate monuments has sparked some discussion of pioneer monuments in a few places. In April, Kalamazoo, Michigan removed its 1940 “Fountain of the Pioneers” because local residents disliked its depiction of a white settler looming over an American Indian.

After decades of protest, San Francisco debated taking down the depiction of a Spanish missionary towering over an American Indian from the 1894 pioneer monument.

In the 1990s, activists persuaded the city to place a plaque telling the dark side of California history in front of the statue. But today’s protesters argued that plaque, hidden by landscaping, is not enough. They want “Early Days” – if not the entire monument – taken down.

The San Francisco Arts Commission agrees, but the Board of Appeals blocked its removal in April.

On September 14, 2018, the “Early Days” statue was removed from the San Francisco monument and placed in storage. In April 2019, about 150 Native American leaders and youth from across California posed for photographs on the empty base where “Early Days” once stood. The photos will be part of the San Francisco Art Commission’s American Indian Initiative.

Each pioneer monument has its own history and local meaning. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. But communities are beginning to consider removing or reinterpreting these monuments to white conquest.

CYNTHIA PRESCOTT is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Dakota.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE CONVERSATION

Renaissance on the Bayou: The Revival of a Lost Language

In the summer of 1930, at the dawn of the Great Depression, a 21-year-old linguist named Morris Swadesh set out for Louisiana to record the area’s Native American languages, which were disappearing rapidly.

Morris and his peers were in a race against time to document them, and in the small town of Charenton on the Bayou Teche, he encountered Benjamin Paul and Delphine Ducloux, members of a small tribe called Chitimacha – and the last two speakers of their language.

But today, if you visited the Chitimacha reservation, you’d never know that their language went unspoken for half a century.

Over the past several decades, many Native American tribes have participated in what has become a robust language revitalization movement. As their populations of fluent speakers dwindle and age, tribes want to ensure that their heritage languages are passed on to the next generation – before it’s too late.

But because the Chitimacha tribe had no living speakers for a number of decades, it made the challenge that much greater. In the end, the story of the language’s decline, loss and rebirth is a remarkable example of cultural survival.

Why document a language?

Unlike some other cultural legacies, languages leave no trace in the archaeological record. There’s often no trace in the written record, either.

Only a small portion of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages are well-documented in places like dictionaries and grammar books. Those that are least well-documented are the most endangered.

Many dead or dying languages contain exotic features of verbal and written communication. Chitimacha, for example, doesn’t use a word “be” in phrases like “she is reading.” Instead, speakers must use a verb of position, such as “she sits reading” or “she stands reading.” These are things that challenge linguists’ understanding of how language works.

By working with Ben and Delphine, Morris was trying to capture a small piece of that linguistic diversity before it vanished.

One day, with Morris sitting on Ben’s porch dutifully scribbling down his every word in a composition notebook, Ben finished a story (a riveting tale of how the Chitimacha first acquired fire by stealing it from a mythical old blind man in the west). He then went on to tell Morris:

There were very many stories about the west. I believe I am doing well. I have not forgotten everything yet. When I die, you will not hear that sort of thing again. I am the only one here who knows the stories.

Ben passed away three years later, and Delphine not long thereafter. After their deaths, it seemed the Chitimacha language was doomed to silence.

Why do languages die?

How does a language come to have only two speakers? Why have so many Native American languages become endangered? The causes are manifold, but there are two main ones: sharp reductions in the population of the community that speaks the language, and interruptions in the traditional means of transferring the language from one generation to the next.

In the past, the former caused the most damage. Native American peoples were decimated by European diseases and subject to outright warfare.

A portrait of two Chitimacha by French-born painter François Bernard (1870). Wikimedia Commons

Prior to European contact, the Chitimacha were lords of the bayou, with a territory stretching from Vermillion Bay in the west to present-day New Orleans in the east. They were expert canoe-makers and wielded extensive knowledge of the region’s labyrinthian network of waterways.

But by the time the French arrived in present-day Louisiana in 1699, the tribe’s numbers had dwindled to around 4,000, their communities gutted by European diseases that spread faster than the Europeans themselves.

After a protracted war with the French, they retreated deep into the bayou, where the their reservation at Charenton sits today. The 1910 census recorded just 69 people living there.

Only later did the second cause of language decline occur, when children on the reservation were sent to the infamous Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, which interrupted the transmission of the language to the next generation.

Ben and Delphine, born in the latter half of the 1800s, were part of the last generation to learn the language at home. Eventually their parents and many of their peers passed away, leaving them as the last two speakers of the language.

Renaissance on the bayou

Ben probably never imagined that the efforts of him and Delphine would spark the tribe’s linguistic renaissance, awakening their language from 60 years of silence.

Delphine Ducloux was one of the two last speakers of the Chitimacha language, prior to its revival. State Library of Louisiana

In the early 1990s, cultural director for the tribe Kim Walden received a call from the American Philosophical Society Library informing her that they had all of Morris’ notebooks, and even his drafts for a grammar manual and dictionary, which totaled hundreds of pages in all. Thus began the herculean effort to revive the language.

The tribe put together a small-but-dedicated team of language experts, who set out to learn their language as quickly as possible. They began to produce storybooks based on Ben and Delphine’s stories, and word lists from the dictionary manuscript.

In 2008, the tribe partnered with the software company Rosetta Stone on a two-year project to create computer software for learning the language, which today every registered tribal member has a copy of. This is where I came in, serving as editor and linguist consultant for the project, a monumental collaborative effort involving thousands of hours of translating, editing, recording and photographing. We’re now hard at work finishing a complete dictionary and learner’s reference grammar for the language.

Today, if you stroll through the reservation’s school, you’ll hear kids speaking Chitimacha in language classes, or using it with their friends in the hall. At home they practice with the Chitimacha version of Rosetta Stone, and this past year the tribe even launched a preschool immersion program.

The kids even make up slang that baffles adult ears, a sure sign that the language is doing well – and hopefully will continue to thrive, into the next generation and beyond.

Author Danny Hieber presents the story of the Chitimacha language at the University of California’s Grad Slam competition.

DANIEL W. HIEBER is a PhD Candidate in Linguistics at the University of California in Santa Barbara.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE CONVERSATION

Why Native Americans Struggle to Protect Their Sacred Places

Forty years ago the U.S. Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act so that Native Americans could practice their faith freely and that access to their sacred sites would be protected. This came after a 500-year-long history of conquest and coercive conversion to Christianity had forced Native Americans from their homelands.

Today, their religious practice is threatened all over again. On Dec. 4, 2017, the Trump administration reduced the Bears Ears National Monument, an area sacred to Native Americans in Utah, by over 1 million acres. Bears Ears Monument is only one example of the conflict over places of religious value. Many other such sacred sites are being viewed as potential areas for development, threatening the free practice of Native American faith.

While Congress created the American Indian Religious Freedom Act to provide “access to sacred sites,” it has been open to interpretation. Native Americans still struggle to protect their sacred lands.

Land-based religions

Native Americans have land-based religions, which means they practice their religion within specific geographic locations. As Joseph Toledo, a Jemez Pueblo tribal leader, says, sacred sites are like churches; they are “places of great healing and magnetism.”

Some of these places, as in the case of Bears Ears National Monument, are within federal public lands. As a Native American scholar, I have visited many of these places and felt their power.

For thousands of years, tribes have used Bears Ears for rituals, ceremonies and collecting medicines used for healing. The different tribes – the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe and the Pueblo of Zuni – have worked to protect the land. Together they set up a nongovernmental organization, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition to help conserve the landscape in 2015.

Native American tribes believe Bears Ears is the last of undisturbed sacred lands. Mark Stevens, CC BY-NC-SA

The tribes believe Bears Ears is one of the last large undisturbed areas in the lower 48 states and contains the spirits of those who once lived there. Bears Ears Navajo elder Mark Maryboy emphasized, “It’s very important that we protect the earth, the plants, and special ceremonial places in Bears Ears for future generations — not just for Native Americans, but for everybody.”

Sacred landscape

My great-grandparents, Páyotayàkχkumei and Kayetså’χkumi, (translated as Aims-while-flying-through-the-air and Hollering-in-the-air), were well-known religious leaders on the Blackfeet reservation. They lived in the foothills of the south side of the reservation. However, they went into the mountains and onto public lands in an area now called the Badger-Two Medicine in northcentral Montana to practice their religion.

My great-grandfather traveled into Badger canyon to trap eagles and gather their feathers which he used in ceremonies and for divine protection. My great-grandmother gathered medicinal plants used in healing ceremonies. Together they prayed and sought solitude in this sacred landscape.

Similar to Bears Ears, the Badger-Two Medicine, a 130,000-acre area within the Lewis and Clark National Forest, became embroiled in a controversy over potential natural resource development between 1982 and 2017. The Blackfeet tribe argued that these lands were sacred. And that tribal members, such as my great-grandparents, had used these lands for years for spiritual purposes.

The Blackfeet tribe ultimately succeeded in stopping development, but only after a 35-year-long fight with the Department of Interior, which initially approved almost 50 oil and gas leases. In 2017 Interior Secretary Jewell canceled the last of these leases. This means these public lands will not be used for natural resource development in the future.

Now my family and other Blackfeet, who have used the Badger-Two Medicine for millennia, can use these public lands for their religious practice in solitude.

Forty years later

The reality is, however, that not every dispute between tribes and the U.S. government ends up in favor of the tribes. Historically, Native American tribes have struggled to explain why certain landscapes are sacred for them.

In 1988, just 10 years after the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the Supreme Court considered a case involving the construction of a U.S. Forest Service road through undeveloped federal lands sacred to northern California tribes in the Six Rivers National Forest.

The lower court had ruled in favor of the Yurok, Karok and Tolowa tribes stating the road would impact their religious practice.

However, the Supreme Court reversed the decision, ruling that building a road through a sacred landscape would not prohibit the tribes “free exercise” of religion.

The tribes lost, because the Supreme Court viewed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act as a policy and not a law with legal protections.

Ultimately, the road was not built because Congress stepped in and added this sacred area to the existing Siskiyou Wilderness, which is a protected area by federal law.

What was noteworthy in the SCOTUS deliberations, though, was the dissenting opinion of Justice William Brennan, who defended land-based religions. He said,

“Native American faith is inextricably bound to the use of land. The site-specific nature of Indian religious practice derives from the Native American perception that land is itself a sacred, living being.”

Indeed, religion scholars such as Yale professor Tisa Wenger point outthat “the most important religious freedom issues for Native Americans” center around protecting their sacred places.

At a time when the Trump administration has created a new task force to address discrimination against certain religious groups, the exclusion of Bears Ears and other places of religious significance from these discussions raises important questions about religious freedom in the United States and also the legacy of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

ROSALYN R. LAPIER is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at The University of Montana.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE CONVERSATION

Inside an Apache Rite of Passage Into Womanhood

For the Mescalero Apache Tribe, girls are not recognized as women until they have undergone the Sunrise Ceremony- an ancient, coming-of-age ceremony that lasts for four days. Last May, VICE got rare access to the ceremony for Julene Geronimo - the great, great grand-daughter of the renowned Apache leader, Geronimo. We followed Julene through each day of her arduous rite-of-passage to better understand what womanhood means for the Apache tribe, and how these ceremonies play a significant role in preserving a way of life that almost became extinct.