Last week, we posted (here) the video of the documentary “Chiefs,” about the legendary basketball teams at Wyoming Indian High School on the Wind River reservation. Now comes this Associated Press story by Matt Joyce about the Chiefs. The more stories about the Chiefs, the merrier, as far as we’re concerned.

ETHETE, Wyo. (AP) — The gym is adorned with championship banners, expectations are high, and the players gasp and burn their way through sprints during the first days of basketball practice at Wyoming Indian High School.

The afternoon is growing late and the sun casts long shadows across the snowcapped Wind River mountains. Inside the brick gym, the Chiefs — winners of the 2A state championship in March — run more drills, more sprints. Theirs is an up-tempo, run-and-gun game, and stamina is critical to their chances for a repeat.

Basketball is king on the Wind River Indian Reservation — a 3,440-square-mile expanse of mountains, valleys and rivers that’s home to the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes. And the Chiefs, who have built one of Wyoming’s most successful high school basketball teams, are the pride of a community beset by poverty, alcoholism and related social ills.

Hundreds of raucous Wyoming Indian fans made the 130-mile drive to Casper to see the 155-student school take its seventh state title. At the final buzzer, the players, some of them with their hair in long pony tails, were mobbed by friends and family, young and old, seeking autographs and pictures.

The community celebrated the championship with a potluck dinner at the high school gym, said head coach Craig Ferris. They watched a video of the title game, and the players donned war bonnets and were honored with a victory dance.

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Tags: buffalo post, Eastern Shoshone, Native American news, Native American sports, Northern Arapaho, Wind River Indian Reservation, Wyoming Indian High School

Mark Trahant is a Kaiser Media Fellow examining the Indian Health Service and its relevance to the national health care reform debate. He is a member of Idaho’s Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. Comment here.

The month of December promises to be full of drama: Will the Senate pass health care reform? Is there enough time to debate the hundreds of expected amendments before Christmas? And at the top of the wish list, are there really 60 votes to pass a bill?

The notion of requiring a super-majority in the Senate may be one of our nation’s most anti-democratic traditions. The Senate elects two members from each state. California’s 36 million citizens get two votes – exactly the same two votes as Wyoming’s 532,000 people. The super-majority makes matters worse because senators representing less than 40 percent of the population can block the legislation that most Americans favor.

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Tags: buffalo post, Health care reform, Mark Trahant

U.S. Rep Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat, is pushing a grant program that would give schools with Indian nicknames money to buy new uniforms and repaint walls, according to this story by the Press of Atlantic City.

“There is mixed opinion in the American Indian community nationwide, but regionally, most of the tribes appear to be dead-set against American Indian mascots,” John Norwood, a councilman of the Bridgeton-based Nanticoke Lenni Lenape Tribal Nation, tells the Press. “It’s an awful thing to go to school and see a caricature of your people.”

Pallone is vice chair of the House Native American cacucus. His bill singles out four nicknames as derogatory – Braves, Chiefs, Indians and Redskins. South Jersey has the Absegami Braves and Buena Chiefs.

Steve Fortis, Absegami’s athletic director, tells the Press he doesn’t recall any groups criticizing the school’s team name and says, “We try to promote the culture in the Lenape tribe that we’re named after.”

Norwood counters that argument, saying, “The excuse that the schools have typically given is that not only are they honoring us – which is ridiculous if we’re asking them to stop – but that they can’t afford to make the change. This takes away the second excuse.”

Gwen Florio

Tags: Absegami High School, buffalo post, Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape, Native American news, Team nicknames, U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone