The Native American and Indigenous Studies Association began its international meeting in Tucson last night, despite calls to boycott conventions in Arizona as a means of protesting that state’s new anti-immigration law and ethnic studies ban.
But as Tohono O’odham Nation activist Mike Wilson tells KVOA, here, “If we had boycotted this conference, once again the Native voice would have been silenced.”
Robert Warrior, association president, says members of the group, most of whom are educators, are most concerned about the ethnic studies law:
Robert Valencia, vice chairman of the Pascua Yaqui tribe, says, “Under ethnic studies is Native American studies. And we need to be able to support the intent of Native American studies for our children.” Valencia says about 1,000 Pascua Yaqui students attend schools in the Tucson Unified School District.
Participants also believe what’s happening in Arizona has worldwide implications. Alice Te Punga Somerville came to the conference from New Zealand. She says, “We can see there are connections between the issue here and what might happen in our domestic politics or in other places around the world.”
Tomorrow, U.S. Rep. Paul Grijalva of Arizona, who backs a boycott, is to address the conference.
This Wonk Room report interviews Vee Newton, a Native American man who says he was stopped by Arizona police at a checkpoint after three cars full of white people passed through. He was wearing traditional attire at the time. He blames Arizona’s new law that requires police to check people suspected of being in the country illegally.
Newton tells Sarah Reynolds, a freelance journalist (there’s an audio link to the interview): “The questions were stated to me in a tone that I felt was very degrading to me. So I simply stated to them that I am a native of America, I am a native to the land and I am Native American.”
As Wonk Room points out:
Since Arizona enacted a set of draconian immigration laws which many claim will “exacerbate racial-profiling,” much of the focus has been on the effect its implementation will have on the state’s Latino population. However, along with being home to almost two million Latinos, Arizona has the second largest total Native American population of any state. While Native American tribes possess claims to Arizona lands that date back farther than any other group, they are often racially profiled and mistaken for undocumented immigrants of Latin American descent.
Indian Country Today, meanwhile, has this report by Rob Capriccioso that says Arizona’s new immigration law has left Native people “alarmed that tribal sovereignty has been violated, with the looming possibility that individual liberties will be threatened.”
Members of the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, which opposed the S.B. 1070, traveled to Washington after Gov. Jan Brewer signed it into law in hopes of educating policymakers on its potential effects.
“We have a range of concerns, including tribal sovereign nations not being recognized as able to define and protect their own borders as they see fit, and the possibility that tribal citizens will be profiled by police,” John Lewis, director of the organization, tells Capriccioso. Both the Tohono O’odham and the Pascua Yaqui Nations share borders with Arizona and Mexico.
The American Civil Liberties Union has vowed to monitor the situation as it pertains to Native Americans, Capriccioso reports.
We’ll be keeping an eye on the situation as it unfolds.
Gwen Florio
University of Idaho professor Dr. Ed Galindo worked with a beaver on research that involves testing hair samples (DNA) and asessing health. (Ed Galindo courtesy photo to Indian Country Today)
Scientists deal with facts. But there’s one fact that University of Idaho professor Ed Galindo wants to change – that only 0.3 percent of engineers in the United States are Native American.
But how to change it? Schools need to, as Galindo tells Indian Country Today’s Tanya Lee, here, “build a different paradigm of educating Native scholars.”
His approach is three-pronged: More faculty with advanced degrees at the 36 tribal colleges. More role models in science fields for Native students. And more research related to tribes:
The result is what Galindo, a Yaqui Indian with strong ties to the Shoshone Bannock Tribes, calls it the ISTEM (Indigenous Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education program….
ISTEM is not a stand-alone program. “It’s a process of respect, understanding, a holistic curriculum where science degree candidates sit in on classes on tribal sovereignty, health, leadership and law. Many of these scholars will go back to their communities. They will be more valuable to their communities that way than if they were highly specialized in just one area,” Galindo said.
So far, the Idaho program has two participants, former astronaut John Herrington, who is Chickasaw, and Frank Finley, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and a science teacher at Salish Kootenai College in Montana.
As Finley tells Lee, “Eurocentric scientific training is an entirely linear strategy. A researcher will go out and study an animal for three or four months in the summer, and then write his master’s thesis. Natives don’t do that. A hunter will follow an animal all year round. It takes half a lifetime to understand the life cycle of an elk, say. You can’t learn enough in three months to say you know anything.”
Meanwhile, Glaindo is looking for funding from the National Science Foundation, NASA and National Institutes of Health, and hopes eventually to enroll 20 students in his program.
Gwen Florio
Beyond powwow songs: “Earthsongs” radio host focuses on modern Native music
Shyanne Beatty hosts “Earthsongs,” a national radio program of modern music for Native America. Beatty, who is Han Gwich’in Athabascan from Eagle, Alaska, tells station KTUU‘s Eric Sowl that “a lot of people think that Native American or indigenous music is powwow music. It’s not that any more. It’s rock, it’s reggae, it’s world music.” Native American broadcasters represent less than 1 percent of the nation’s on-air media talent.
San Miguel Band of Mission Indians donates $1.7 million in Haiti relief
The San Manuel Band of Mission Indians is helping earthquake relief efforts in Haiti by donating $1.7 million to the American Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. According to Indian Country Today, it’s the most recent such effort by the tribe, which donated $700,000 after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita; $1 million for wildfire recovery in Southern California, and $1 million to relief groups in Sudan’s Darfur region.
Senators-Canadiens hockey game was NHL’s first broadcast in Inuktitut
Hockey history was made yesterday with the first-ever broadcast in Inukitut of an NHL game. CBC broadcasters Charlie Panigoniak and Annie Ford called the Ottawa Senators-Montreal Canadiens game in Inuktitut, according to the Nunatsiaq News. The game was broadcast around Nunavut and CBC also streamed it online. The Senators won, 3-2, in OT.
Natives may be added to Alaska’s state song
There’s an effort – again – in Alaska to add references to indigenous people in the state’s song, according to The Tundra Drums. A similar effort failed in 2002, but Sen. Albert Kookesh, who Tlingit and leader in the Alaska Federation of Natives, says times have changed. The bill would add a second verse that references Benny Benson, the Native boy who in 1927 designed the territorial flag that eventually became the state flag. The version begins: A Native lad chose the Dipper’s stars, For Alaska’s flag that there be no bars, Among our cultures.
Pascua Yaqui Tribe announces new casino hotel
Despite an economy that has wreaked havoc on profits from tribal and non-tribal casinos alike, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, owner of two Tucson-area casinos, says it will break ground next month on a casino and hotel expected to create up to 200 jobs. The Sol Casinos Hotel and Convention Center will be an expansion of Casino Del Sol, the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson reports. It’s scheduled to open next year.
Warning: This is a harrowing story at first, that – belatedly – has as happy an ending as possible, under the circumstances.
As the Telegraph of London reports here, the brutalized remains of a dozen Yaqui Indian warriors have finally been buried in a tribal ceremony in Mexico’s Sonora state.
The people died a terrible death. They were among 150 Yaqui men, women and children massacred by Meixcan troops in 1902. History holds that some were clubbed to death to save ammunition. Others appeared to have their ears sliced off as trophies.
As if that weren’t bad enough, an American antrophogist named Ales Hrdlicka collected a dozen of their decaying bodies form the American Museum of Natural History.
Tom Leonard’s story reports that Hrdlicka is said to have beheaded the corpses with a machete and boiled them to remove the flesh. Once the remains arrived in New York, they went into storage and stayed there.
It’s the first time, according to the museum, that it “turned over cultural patrimony to a foreign government that immediately returned it to the indigenous people.”
The tribe held a memorial ceremony at the museum on Central Park with incense, drums and chants.
“They would not be at peace with their souls and conscience until they got their people back to their land,” says Jose Antonio Pompa of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.
Read more about the tribal ceremonies upon the warriors’ return, here.
