We wrote recently, here, about a national magazine taking note of the sad fact that fry bread isn’t exactly the healthiest food out there.

Goodness (albeit not the healthiest goodness) in a pan. (Rapid City Journal photo)

Pause for deep sigh.

The Sioux Falls Argus Leader in South Dakota, where fry bread is the official state food, came back with this story about reactions to that report – and some solutions to its findings.

Stop eating fry bread? Not gonna happen, say a lot of the people who talked to Bryann Becker for the story.

Instead, says Jace DeCory, an instructor with the American Indian Studies Program at Black Hills State University in Spearfish and a member of the Lakota Cheyenne River Sioux tribe, people should just take smaller pieces, and eat it less often.

Which means that on those rare occasions when they treat themselves, it’ll taste that much more delicious.

Gwen Florio

Here’s the entire story from the Associated Press:

MITCHELL, S.D. – The Davison County state’s attorney says its up to alcohol retailers to decide whether military and tribal identification is acceptable to prove age by those buying alcohol.

State’s attorney Pat Smith’s comments follow a letter sent earlier in May from a Mitchell police officer to alcohol retailers saying military and Cheyenne River Sioux tribal IDs are no longer valid forms of ID for alcohol purchases.

But Smith says a retailer must “act as a reasonable and prudent person” when deciding who can legally buy alcohol.

Smith says he recently sent a letter clarifying the rules on alcohol sales to all alcohol retailers in Mitchell.

Arthur Jewett’s family has waited a long time to properly bury the Cheyenne River Sioux soldier who was killed during the Korean War, but whose remains were only recently returned. (See previous post, here.) Today, the Associated Press has this update. Here’s the story in its entirety:

Arthur Jewett

Jewett, an Army sergeant from White Horse, was killed during the Korean War in 1950 but was listed as missing in action until his remains were recovered in 2002 from a mass grave in North Korea. The remains were returned to South Dakota last September and buried.

“It’s great when everything turned out real nice. I mean, (we) brought him home, buried him right alongside his brother, twin brother,” said Louie Jewett, another brother.

Jewett said that in past years when family members gathered around Memorial Day to decorate graves, Arthur’s decoration always went around a memorial plaque beneath a flag pole.

He said when it comes time to decorate the stone that now sits above his brother’s grave, he expects there to be some mixed emotions.

“I’m glad that everything turned out the way it did and my family is glad,” he said. “Yet at the same time, it’s going to be sad, but that’s the way it goes.”

Remember this photo, from January? It’s of the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in South Dakota, one of several reservations in the Midwest and Southwest where winter storms stranded people for days. The situation became so bad — and got so little publicity — that MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann actually made a plea (watch the video, here) on his show for aid, saying that U.S. aid organizations needed to pay attention to crises in their own backyard. Well, months after the fact, aid slowly continues to trickle in. Here’s the entire story from the Associated Press:

Back in January, a Moreau-Grand Electric Cooperative crew digs a 4-mile long trench in the snow north of South Dakota's Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe reservation. (AP Photo/South Dakota Rural Electric Association, Roger Lawien)

So far, the South Dakota Community Foundation has collected $270,000 in donations for a relief fund set up for the reservation. The Bush Foundation and the Northwest Area Foundation have given some matching money.
A portion of the donations were handed over to the reservation on Thursday.

The money is intended to help the tribe recover from an ice storm and blizzard in late January that paralyzed the reservation, knocking out power and water to thousands.

Foundation President Bob Sutton says a large portion of the relief fund will be used to equip emergency shelters.

(Editor’s Note: Today is a day for light posting as I spend most of it traveling. Please check back this evening for postings of the day’s events.)



Elouise Cobell, whose name heads the historic Cobell v. Salazar class action case, has been touring the Dakotas this week to answer questions about last fall’s settlement of more than $3 billion in the case. The money is to compensate tens of thousands of Indian people for federal mismanagement of royalty payments due on their lands. The amount, while one of the largest ever in such a case, still falls far short of the roughly $50 billion some estimate is more accurate, and not everyone is happy with the settlement. Here‘s the entire Rapid City (S.D.) Journal story, by Mary Garrigan, on one of Cobell’s sessions this week:

Oglala Sioux Tribe President Theresa Two Bulls

Cobell finalized the proposed settlement in December 2009 after a 14-year legal battle on behalf of more than 300,000 Native American trust land owners. She alleged the Interior Department bungled the accounting on thousands of individual Native trust accounts for more than 100 years.

But as the U.S. House of Representatives’ Natural Resources Committee held a hearing Wednesday on the settlement, which Congress must approve and fund by an April 16 deadline, critics began cropping up on Capitol Hill and on reservations in South Dakota.

After a March 8 public meeting in Kyle, where Cobell and two of the attorneys in the 14-year-old lawsuit answered questions about the settlement, Oglala Sioux Tribe President Theresa Two Bulls said Wednesday that “there are a lot of questions” about the settlement throughout her reservation, and she canceled a trip to Washington, D.C., to speak in favor of it.

“I declined to testify at the March 10 hearing. I need to hear from my tribe first. I can’t go there to say yes or no on the settlement,” Two Bulls said during a radio address Wednesday to the tribe, broadcast live on KILI radio.

Read the rest of this entry »

Image from Facebook's Reject the Cobell v. Salazar Agreement page

The social networking site is also being used to protest the multi-billion-dollar Cobell v. Salazar settlement for Indian people owed decades’ worth of royalties from the federal government.

The Facebook page is called “Reject The Cobell V. Salazar Agreement,” and only has 114 members so far. Its mission statement:

This Group was inspired by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe’s Elders Council deciding to unanimously REJECT the paltry sum so disrespectfully offered by the US Government.

As Sitting Bull Said: “You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hard-tack, and a little sugar and coffee.”

The Facebook group speaks to the dissatisfaction some people feel with the settlement – more than $3 billion, as opposed to more than $100 billion that some estimate Indian people are actually owed.

Plaintiff Elouise Cobell, who is Blackfeet from Browning, Mont., says she accepted the settlement, announced last fall, because it’s quite a step up from the originally proposed $455 million and also because many of the 50,000 people who will directly benefit are elderly, and could die if further legal wrangling were to continue.

She’s touring reservations in North and South Dakota this week to answer people’s questions about the settlement. (See previous post.)

And, she also writes a weekly Ask Elouise column to address issues concerning the settlement. Check it out here.

Meanwhile, Congress has yet to approve funds mandated by the settlement, and recently delayed that approval – for the second time – until next month.

Gwen Florio

Out of the mouths of babes … OK, in this case, college students. Anyhow, major props to the students journalists at the University of South Dakota, who in this Volante editorial chide the delayed an inadequate response to the terrible sufferings on several western Indian reservations after this winter’s severe storms.

As the students say, “We just don’t pay attention.”

They wrote:

A south Dakota Rural Electric Association crew tries to dig out downed lines near the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation last month. (AP)

As of Feb. 9, the reservation only received $8,000 in donations and power was still down. The disaster may have happened right after Haiti, but isn’t South Dakota generous enough to give more than $8,000 to our own neighbors? Yes we are, the problem is that we didn’t even know it was happening.

It wasn’t until the issue was highlighted on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” that donations started coming in. Within 48 hours, more than $250,000 had been raised. All it took to get help was one minute of airtime, more than two weeks after the disaster.

The fact that it took a national news program to get our attention about such a dire local issue is inexcusable, both for the media and for ourselves.

We can’t say it any better than that. Thanks to the Volante for paying attention.

Gwen Florio

The publication that likes to call itself the nation’s newspaper has a point: If you aren’t reading Buffalo Post’s coverage, or local news outlets in the Dakotas, you probably don’t know much about the disastrous conditions on Indian reservations there following a series of brutal snowstorms.

And, to USA Today’s credit, it’s as hard on itself as it is on everyone else:

No photos or video of sweet suffering faces. No popular vacation landscape for a backdrop. No personal connective ties. Are those the reasons the natural disaster in the Great Plains has gone below our philanthropy radar?

How many of us knew anything about the massive winter storms that have left the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation without power or water or heat for nearly two weeks? (Yes, I know many reading this are on the East Coast, like me, nervously wondering if today’s latest blizzard will knock out our power. But we have resources that tribal people with 80% unemployment in the remote plains simply don’t.)

USA TODAY carried a story nine days ago but, like most media focused on millions suffering in Haiti, we didn’t keep an eye on Native American who are still as freezing, isolated, and miserably unsafe now as then.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann is now raising funds, here, for the effort, as is the Episcopal bishop of South Dakota, who’s set Valentine’s Day weekend as a prime fundraising time. Glad they’re both paying attention.

Gwen Florio

This photo provided by the South Dakota Rural Electric Association shows Moreau-Grand Electric Cooperative crew digging a 4-mile long trench in the snow north of South Dakota's Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe reservation to get to two broken wires on Friday following power and water outages caused by an ice storm. Hundreds of people in rural areas remained without power on Monday. (AP Photo/South Dakota Rural Electric Association, Roger Lawien)

Had we been in Longbrake’s shoes, we’d have had to type a bunch of those symbols – you know, %&$#@!! – that signify far stronger language.

Longbrake is among an estimate 1,700 people on the reservation who still lack power, according to this update by Wayne Ortman of the Associated Press. Tribal Chairman Joseph Brings Plenty says it could be as much as three weeks before it’s fully restored.

The South Dakota National Guard is bringing in generators, as well as helping to distribute food and water. Meanwhile, schools remain closed.

“You get by as best you can,” says Longbrake, whose family is breaking through the ice on a nearby pond to get water to flush their toilet. “You make do.

Facebook has a site where people can help with relief efforts.

Gwen Florio