From the Associated Press out of New York:

By MICHAEL VIRTANEN
Associated Press
ALBANY, N.Y. — The St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Council has stopped sharing revenue from the casino along New York’s northern border with the state, claiming the exclusivity provision of its gambling compact has been violated.
Tribal Chief Mark Garrow said the second-quarter check for about $4.9 million has not been sent. He declined to specify what state officials did against the Mohawks’ seven-county exclusive rights to install and operate slot machines.
Garrow said the move isn’t related to Gov. David Paterson’s administration attempts to tax lucrative tribal cigarette sales to non-Indians and isn’t coordinated with the Seneca tribe’s withholding more than $200 million from its three casinos in western New York. The Mohawks’ letter to the administration was sent last week, he said.
“While the state has yet to comprehensively review the reasoning behind the suggestion that we have violated the gaming compact, one thing is very clear: The St. Regis Mohawks failure to pay the state is an egregious material breach of the gaming compact,” said Morgan Hook, spokesman for Paterson. “The state will now seek all remedies available under the compact including expedited arbitration in order to protect the state and local municipalities from losing this critical funding.”
The administration two weeks ago threatened to end the compact that allows the Seneca Indian Nation to operate three casinos in western New York because of withheld revenue sharing payments. Counsel Peter Kiernan said in a letter that the Senecas owed the state and local governments about $105.5 million from 2009 and $109 million for 2010.
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Even before yesterday’s shooting of a security guard outside a Native American-owned cigarette shop on Long Island, tensions were high over New York’s plan to collect taxes on cigarettes sold by Natives to non-Natives. Carolyn Thompson of the Associated Press explores the issue in depth:

CATTARAUGUS INDIAN RESERVATION, N.Y. (AP) — As New York Indian Nation leaders battle in courtrooms to preserve their tax-free cigarette market, tensions are rising on reservations, where the state’s renewed efforts to tax sales to non-Native customers is viewed as yet another attack on Native American rights.

“For 200 years, we have been dealing with efforts to take our land, efforts to take our resources, efforts to take our jurisdiction,” said Robert Odawi Porter, senior policy adviser and counsel for the 7,800-member Seneca nation in western New York, which says its cigarette business is a $100 million-a-year industry.

Trustee Lance Gumbs from Long Island’s Shinnecock tribe called the tax “just another extension of … the genocidal tactics of New York state.”

“Every tribe is committed to fight this issue,” said Gumbs at his smoke shop in Southampton.

Nine New York tribes are in the cigarette business. The $4.35 sales tax would force them to raise their prices and blunt their competitive edge over off-reservation sellers. Tribal leaders say the income loss would devastate economies.

A rally last week alongside the New York state Thruway where it bisects the Senecas’ Cattaraugus reservation was organized as a peaceful “people’s rally.” But there were reminders of 1997 chaos that erupted the last time the state tried to tax reservation sales.

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Last month was full of news about the Iroquois Nationals’ futile battle to travel to the World Lacrosse Championships in England. The problem? First U.S. Homeland Security, and then British officials questioned the validity of their Haudenosaunee Confederacy passports. Now, the Associated Press’ Samantha Gross, who covered much of the original controversy, follows up with this story on the Iroquois Nations’ longtime fight for respect for have their sovereignty and identity:
ONONDAGA NATION, N.Y. (AP) — A group of young men have gathered in the longhouse for the feather dance, and the sounds of their singing filter outside, where Mohawk Chief Howard Thompson sits.

His people call him Onerekowa, the name his predecessors have borne for a thousand years. Each month, when he gathers with the 49 other chiefs from the six Haudenosaunee nations, he stands to speak in the language of his ancestors. And when the 50 come to a decision, they don’t take a majority vote. Instead, as it has for a millennium, the leaders of the Iroquois Confederacy decide by consensus.

Today Thompson awaits the start of a meeting of the Haudenosaunee Peace and Trade Committee, where tradition will grapple with the outside world. The issue is passports.

Last month, the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team missed their world championship in Britain rather than travel overseas under U.S. or Canadian passports. Their Haudenosaunee passports were deemed inadequate in a post-9/11 world — partly handwritten, lacking in high-tech security features.

Haudenosaunee Documentation Committee chairman Karl Hill peers fiercely from behind wire-rimmed glasses as he explains how the confederacy has spent upward of $1 million to bring their identification into line with the U.S. government’s new standards. For now, the handwritten Haudenosaunee passports can still be easily counterfeited, he says.

But, he adds, that would never be reason enough for the lacrosse players to travel on another nation’s document. Such a choice would be a betrayal of their national identity — an identity he says is as valid as ever, even though his people shop in American malls and watch American television and study at American colleges.

We are a nation, he insists, and it matters.

“It means that we’ve survived,” he says.

“The fact that we’re still here is a testament to our survival. Now why on earth would we give that up and call ourselves U.S. citizens?”

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Child death in foster care causes First Nations outcry
Twice in six months, children from the Sturgeon Lake First Nation in Saskatchewan have died in foster care under suspicious circumstances. The most recent case, that of a 22-month-old child, has prompted calls for a public inquiry, according to this CBC report. The little boy, Evander Lee Daniels, drowned in a bathtub and also had been scalded, according to this earlier CBC piece. watch a video, here.

Some Wind River Reservation residents told to seek high ground during floods
Even though floodwaters are receding in central Wyoming, residents in the Wind River Indian Reservation community of Sharp Nose are being told to seek higher ground because of rain and snow last night. With snow falling at about an inch an hour, authorities feared more flooding along the Wind River, according to the Casper (Wyo.) Star Tribune, here.

New dorm goes up at Crazy Horse Memorial
The nearly-completed Crazy Horse Student Living and Learning Center was open to the public yesterday. The $2.5 million dorm will house the Summer University Program at Crazy Horse Memorial, sanctioned by the University of South Dakota’s Department of American Indian Studies, according to this Rapid City (S.D.) Journal story by Tyler Jerke.

Cape Wind opponents see parallels with gulf oil catastrophe
Indian Country Today’s Gale Courey Toensing wrote here last week about the massive wind-power project off the coast of Massachusetts, which is vehemently opposed by the Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag nations. Opponents say the mitigation opposed for the Cape Wind project is akin to the safety measures that so badly failed on the BP rig now spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Fort Niagara adds Native American interpreters for truer history lesson
Every summer, Fort Niagara in New York hires history lovers and actors from Niagara University to portray characters who might have populated the region, and to explain its history to tourists. This year, those history interpreters include Jordan Smith, a Niagara Falls Native American educator, in the role of a Mohawk Indian, and Brenda Patterson, who is Tuscaroran and plays the role of a Seneca woman. The Mohawk and Seneca tribes are part of the Iroquois Confederacy. Read more here in the Niagara Gazette.

Gwen Florio

Blues Indigo is the theme, with yet another lineup that gives us the blues because we aren’t there.

Murray Porter, who is Mohawk from the Six Nations Reserve, starts off the evening. Porter’s performance on the Steinway piano designed especially for the Olympics is featured in the video above. Here’s his MySpace page.

Then there’s Leanne Goose, who is Dene/Inuvialuit from the Arctic Circle town of Inuvik in the far western Northwest Territories, just a slice of the Yukon between it and Alaska. Experience her high-energy roots music in the video below, or on her Web site.

Rounding out the evening are performances by Shakti Hayes, Jared Sowan (also on MySpace), and Pat Braden, (here, on MySpace).

For a complete schedule of events at the First Nations Pavilion, click here.

Gwen Florio

Two widely disparate acts are featured tonight at the First Nations Pavilion at the Vancouver Olympics.

Kinnie Starr (video above), who is of Mohawk and European heritage, performs her blend of hip-hop and alternative songs. Her music has been performed on the TV show “The L Word.” Read an interview with her here, and check out her MySpace page here.

Then there’s Soul Paua (video below), who’ve come all the way from New Zealand to perform their contemporary music with Maori and Polynesian influences. You can find out more about them on their Web site.

For coming events at the First Nations Pavilion, check here.

Gwen Florio

Here‘s how the New York Times describes the new graphic novel, “Journey into Mohawk Country,” told through the point of view of white adventurer Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert.

The graphic novel “Journey into Mohawk Country,” by the artist George O’Connor, tells the tale of a 23-year old surgeon and adventurer, Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, who was charged with forging new trade relationships for the Dutch colony. In the winter of 1634, he and two friends set off from Fort Orange, in present-day Albany, north to Iroquois country, where the Mohawk tribe controlled the most important trade routes in the region. Van den Bogaert, a likely ancestor of Humphrey Bogart, chronicled the journey in a diary that was later translated by Charles Gehring, the director of the New Netherland Project at the New York State library.

If you go to the site, you can click and drag your way through an excerpt of the novel. It’ll be interesting to see how the Mohawk people are portrayed.

Gwen Florio

And speaking of Native athletes (See previous post about Louis Sockalexis, the first Native American to play Major League baseball) – it’s been a full quarter-century since a Native American competitor won an Olympic gold medal.

Jim Thorpe, who is Sac and Fox, who won gold medals in 1912 in Stockholm, and Billy Mills (Oglala Lakota) who won gold in 1964 in Tokyo.

And, in the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, Canada’s Alwyn Morris, who is Mohawk from Kahnawake, Quebec, and his partner Hugh Fisher won the men’s 1,000-meter doubles kayak race.

When Morris won, he held an eagle feather high As he tells Canadian Press, here, that salute meant everything to him.

It honored the grandparents who raised him, and his heritage as an aboriginal.

“It was important for me to be self identified in order to share that with the other part of who I am,” he says.

So it’s frustrating to report there are no aboriginal athletes on the teams that Canada will send to the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.

Aaron Marchant, of British Columbia’s Squamish Nation aims to change that.

In 2004, he helped develop First Nations Snowboard Team with the goal of putting a snowboarder in the Olympics. The program has snowboarders training on nine mountains in British Columbia and one in Washington State, he tells CP.

“What we’re doing is very positive,” he said. “We’re striving to get more athletes to have the support to get to that level. I definitely see our program progressing.”

For his part, Morris says that it’s important aboriginal people are being included in the staging of the Games, something he says could inspire indigenous athletes.

“If the Four Host Nations for the 2010 Games show that there is legacy, that there is ability, and it’s more than just being the facade of the Olympic Games in Vancouver,” he says, “that’s going to lend a tremendous amount of support for athletes who are saying, ‘You know what, that’s where we were in 2010, and in 2020 we’re at the top of the podium.”

Gwen Florio

As Indian Country Today’s Gale Courey Toensing notes here, indigenous people have most recently been in the news because of their strong voices during last week’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Less noticed is the fact that they also participated in the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions, asking the Pope to repudiate the Christian Doctrine of Discovery. That conference, which meets every five years, was held earlier this month in Australia.

A Haudenosaunee delegation was among the groups saying it’s time to disavow the racist, 15th century Doctrine that, as Toensing writes, allows powerful countries to dehumanize indigenous people and devastate the Earth in the quest for resources and markets.

“Overall the trip was very successful in bringing forward the idea of rescinding the papal bulls,” said Jake Swamp, Wolf Clan sub-chief of the Kahniakehaka, Mohawk Nation, author, and founder of the Tree of Peace Society, an international organization promoting peace and environmental conservation.

“I think that’s the most important thing in our time is to finally attack the roots of the oppression experienced by indigenous peoples worldwide.”

The papal bulls were 15th century documents issued by the popes of the Roman Catholic Church giving permission to the kings of Spain and Portugal to conquer and claim “undiscovered” lands, enslave or skill their non-Christian populations, and expropriate their possessions and resources. The English monarchy followed suit with “charters” to explorers such as John Cabot to colonize “the New World.”

The Doctrine of Discovery, which these documents formulated, was a principle of international law – a kind of early trade agreement that whichever Christian European country “discovered” lands populated by non-Christians could claim those lands and resources.

The indigenous delegates also called for immediate action on climate change; the protection of earth-based religions and sacred sites both within and outside their territories; strengthening and protecting indigenous cultures and languages, repatriation of the ancestors’ remains and sacred items, and the support and implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Gwen Florio