Here’s the full announcement on the meetings:

Information on how Native Americans in Montana may be able to share in a recently announced $3.4 billion settlement of Indian Trust claims will be discussed at meetings Friday and next week.

On Friday Elouise Cobell of Browning, lead plaintiff in the case, will be meeting with Blackfeet Tribal Members at the New Eagle Shield Center in Browning from 11:30 a.m. until 1:30 p.m.

On Monday she and David Smith, a member of the plaintiffs’ litigation team that helped negotiate the settlement, will begin visiting other three Indian communities to share information about the agreement.

They will visit the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes Monday at the Salish Kootenai College Victor Charlo/Johnny Arlee Theater in Pablo from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.

On Tuesday they will visit the Fort Belknap Tribes at the Little River Learning Lodge in the Bee Gawn Hey and Si Si Rooms at Fort Belknap College from 1 p.m to 5 p.m. and on Wednesday they will visit Fort Peck Tribes at the Silver Wolf Casino, Highway 25 East, Wolf Point, from 1 to 5 p.m.

Native Americans whose families have individual Indian money trust accounts or who own individual Indian trust land are welcome to attend the meeting and ask questions about the settlement.

The Obama administration announced the proposed agreement to resolve a 14-year-old class action lawsuit Ms. Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, and other Native Americans filed against the government in 1996. The lawsuit claims that the federal government mismanaged individual Indians’ trust accounts.

Congress and the courts must approve the settlement.

Under the proposed terms, the federal government will create a $1.4 billion Accounting/Trust Administration Fund and a $2 billion Trust Land Consolidation Fund. The settlement also creates an Indian Education Scholarship fund of up to $60 million to improve access to higher education for Indians.

Cobell also answers questions about the settlement online in her weekly Ask Elouise column, here.

Tags: Blackfeet, buffalo post, Cobell v. Salazar, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Elouise Cobell, Fort Belknap College, Fort Belknap Reservation, Fort Peck Reservation, Gwen Florio, Indian trust case, Interior Department, Salsih Kootenai College

Here’s the companion piece by the Missoulian’s Jamie Kelly to our previous post about the casting call for the movie adaptation of James Welch’s “Winter in the Blood.”

Once upon a time, James Welch dreamed of seeing his words become pictures.

That was 26 years ago when Welch was first approached about turning his debut novel, “Winter in the Blood,” into a movie.

“My diary from that night says, ‘We went to bed giggling,’ and then we fell asleep giggling,” said Lois Welch, a retired University of Montana literature professor and widow of James, one of the most celebrated Indian novelists and poets in history.

James Welch, who was Blackfeet and Gros Ventre, and also Irish, died of a heart attack at the age of 62 in 2003. His work was lauded by critics the world over as deeply resonant not only of the Indian culture about which he wrote, but of all people.

“Winter in the Blood,” released in 1974, got its highest praise from the New York Times Book Review, easily the standard-bearer of literary criticism in the country.

Shortly afterward, the novel was “optioned” by a film agency that sought to turn it into a motion picture.

Trouble is, it never happened.

But it has a second chance now.
Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: "Fool's Crow", "Killing Custer", "The Indian Lawyer", "The Slaughter Rule", "Winter in the Blood", Alex and Andrew Smith, Blackfeet, buffalo post, Fort Belknap Reservation, Grox Ventre, Hellgate High School, James Welch, Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, Lois Welch, Native American news, University of Montana

The January issue of Smithsonian magazine features this story on what it calls a “breathtaking” collection of 88 quilts stitched by members of Northern Plains tribes.

The National Museum of the American Indian is home to one of the largest such collections, and the article focuses on those acquired from a collector named Florence Pulford.

Pulford, a San Francisco Bay area homemaker, first got interested in quilts of the Plains tribes in the 1960s. According to NMAI curator Ann McMullen, these quilts—many bearing a central octagonal star—functioned as both ritual and practical replacements for Plains Indians buffalo robes. Bison hides had grown scarce as herds were hunted nearly to extinction in a campaign to subdue the Plains tribes during the late 1800s. Missionary wives taught quilting techniques to Indian women, who soon made the medium their own. Many of the patterns and motifs, McMullen says, “have a look very similar to [designs painted on] buffalo robes.”

The collection began with an invitation to the Pulford family from Frank Arrow, a Gros Ventre man who worked for them, to visit him on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. There, according to the story by Owen Edwards, Pulford was given a quilt as a gift. She was so struck by the work – and the way the quilts were made from scraps – that she began supplying quilting materials to women on the reservation.
Pulford would then sell the quilts, and return profits to the women.

More than a quarter of the quilts in the collection are by Almira Buffalo Bone Jackson, a member of the Red Bottom band of Assiniboine on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana. Jackson died in 2004 at age 87.

Gwen Florio

Tags: Almira Buffalo Bone Jackson, Assiniboine, buffalo post, Florence Pulford, Fort Belknap Reservation, Fort Peck Reservation, Gros Ventre, National Museum of the American Indian, Native American news, Smithsonian

A.J. Longsoldier, who led his Hays-Lodge Pole (Mont.) high school basketball team to the 2007 Class C championship, was pronounced dead yesterday after being taken to a hospital from the Hill County Jail.

I was devastated,” Charlie Ereaux, who coached Long Soldier at Hays-Lodge Pole, told the Havre Daily News, here. “I couldn’t believe it.”

LongSoldier, 18, was pronounced dead at Northern Montana Hospital several hours after being brought there from the Hill County Jail, Sheriff Don Brostrom tells the News’ Alice Campbell.

“I didn’t even know he was in jail,” his mother Dayna Bear says, here. “I loved him.”

County Attorney Donald Ranstrom says LongSoldier was arrested in Blaine County on a warrant for a charge of violation of court order, and went into the jail Thursday. Ranstrom said he could not supply details because it involved a juvenile case.

An autopsy yesterday revealed no apparent cause of death, but a coroner’s inquest will be held, authorities say.

“I loved that kid,” Ereaux said. But he says that after LongSoldier transferred to Harlem in his junior year, “it kind of fell apart for him,” Ereaux said. “He really loved basketball, and he wanted to play bad – he did – it’s just he had a rough life growing up.” Still, he says, many Division I schools were “drooling” over LongSoldier.

Ereaux tells Campbell that LongSoldier completed a treatment program last year. He was enrolled as a freshman at Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas but withdrew last month, Campbell reports.

“A.J. will be missed, but he will not be forgotten,” Ereaux says. There’s a lot of hurt people around here. He made a lot of hope for a lot of people.”

Gwen Florio

Tags: A.J. LongSoldier, buffalo post, Fort Belknap Reservation, Hays-Lodge Pole High School, Native American news

Tribes are losing their languages and traditions as their elders die.

That’s doubly sad because those same traditions can be used to confront today’s challenges, tribal leaders said at a meeting on spirituality and wellness this week of the Montana-Wyoming Tribal Leaders Council.

Elders need to be sure to pass on those traditions, Joe Iron Man reminded the group, according to this Billings Gazette story. “They never teach. They take it with them,” says Iron Man, a spiritual leader from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation.

Cochran reports that Iron Man, who is Cree and Gros Ventre, is mentoring five young men, teaching them how to perform traditional sun dances.

Joseph Stone, a clinical psychologist, tells Cochran that reviving such traditions, lost when Indian children were sent to Christian boarding schools or when families tried to assimilate into white culture, can help tribal members who have lost their way.

“I don’t get the luxury of standing here talking about this stuff as though it’s a theory,” says Stone, who is Blackfeet. “It’s my story.”

Gwen Florio

Tags: Blackfeet, buffalo post, Fort Belknap Reservation, Montana Wyoming Tribal Leaders Council, Native American news, Native traditions

Is it just us, or is “Get over it” one of the more offensive phrases in the English language? Nona Main says she hears it a lot.

Main is Gros Ventre, from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in northern Montana, and she says people often tell her that the racism she perceives is all in her head, according to this story in Indian Country Today.

“A lot of that goes with the fact that a lot of people think that we have a victim mentality,” Main says. “And they say, ‘Get over it. It happened a long time ago.’ It didn’t happen a long time ago, it’s still happening. I’m not trying to play the victim, I’m trying to educate you about what’s going on in my world so you guys can stop treating people this way. I don‘t treat you that way.”

Main was part of a panel discussion on racism in Montana. Titled “There’s an Elephant in Our Community,” the event was sponsored by Not In Our Town, an organization against racial discrimination, and the Unitarian Universalist Fellow-ship church at MSU-Billings as part of American Indian Heritage Day. Main is a student at MSUB.

She says comments on the local paper’s Web site are an example of where negative stereotypes of American Indians prevail whenever there is a story about them.

“If you go on there, and you read the things that people say on there, you feel like saying, ‘Why can’t these people come up to me and tell me that to my face rather than hide behind a computer with a name that nobody knows you by? Can you come up to me and tell me that to my face what you think of me? Can you do that?’ And I don’t think any of them can.”

On this particular point, we heartily concur with Main.

And speaking of Indians in Montana, members of that state’s congressional delegation say they’re moving quickly on a bill to grant federal recognition to that state’s landless Little Shell Band of Chippewa. The tribe, whose 4,300 members live near Great Falls, Mont., has been formally seeking recognition for three decades. Today, the Bureau of Indian Affairs turned them down.

“It kind of hurts, naturally, but it’s not the end of the line,” Little Shell elder Roger Salois, 72, tells the Associated Press, here. “…But we’re still together, and we’re still Little Shell.”

The Little Shell have proven their persistence. Now it’s time for the state’s elected lawmakers to do the same.

Gwen Florio

Tags: buffalo post, Federal recognition, Fort Belknap Reservation, Gros Ventre, Little Shell Chippewa, Montana State University Billings, Native American news, racism

Some might find John Collins’ home on northern Montana’s windswept Rocky Boy’s Reservation too remote, too forbidding. Collins knows that.

“A lot of people hate it,” he tells the reporter Chelsi Moy in this extensive story in today’s Missoulian. “I don’t get why they hate it. It’s where you live.”

It’s home. It’s family. And the powerful pull those forces exert keep many Indian kids from leaving the reservations and traveling hundreds of miles to the University of Montana. UM officials are trying to change that. Recently, UM President George Dennison and others from the university embarked on an intensive recruiting effort, traveling to every one of Montana’s Indian reservations extolling the virtues of a university education.

Some 545 Native students attend UM; Dennison would like to see that number at 1,000, which would more accurately reflect Indians’ proportion of Montana’s population.

“We want students to consider UM. We want them very much,” Dennison says. “But as I tell students, ‘You need to get some college. But it’s more important to go where you feel comfortable.’”

Gwen Florio

Tags: buffalo post, Fort Belknap Reservation, Native American news, Rocky Boy's Reservation, University of Montana

We said we’d delve more deeply into the issue of swine flu on reservations, and we have. In today’s Missoulian, Michael Jamison reports here that the tribal leaders are worried about the outbreak of 16 cases on Montana’s Fort Belknap Reservation, as well as the fact that state’s only death was on the Fort Peck Reservation.

“We’re definitely worried that it might be more prevalent on the reservations,” said Raymond Chandler, vice president of the tribal council at Fort Belknap, home to the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes. “You can’t prove it, because they don’t keep good numbers; but all you have to do is look around to see what’s happening.”

The story also recounts similar concerns in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. In the latter province, First Nations leaders have declared a state of emergency. They’re looking to raise $1.5 million to purchase medical kits, because the rate of infection in tribal communities is reported at 135 per 100,000 people, compared to 20 per 100,000 people nationwide.

There are similar dispararities in the numbers in Montana counties with reservations, as opposed to largely white counties. But Chandler says he doesn’t need to look at the numbers.

“All you have to do is look around and it’s obvious,” he says. It’s obvious, he tells Jamison, in the masked faces waiting at the reservation health clinic. It’s obvious in the number of people home sick, and in the special hand-washing stations set up at powwow this year.

“We continue to have sick people,” says Avis Spencer, public information officer for Fort Belknap’s Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes. She predicts off-reservation towns will, too. After all, she said, crowded housing is nothing compared to crowded classrooms, and school is just around the corner.

Finally, say tribal leaders, all of this points up to the inadequacies in the Indian health care system. As we said when this story first began to simmer, stay tuned. There’ll be more.

Gwen Florio

Tags: buffalo post, Fort Belknap Reservation, Fort Peck Reservation, H1N1 influenza, Indian Health Service, Native American news, Swine flu

This AP story on an outbreak of swine flu on the Fort Belknap Reservation begins in straightforward-enough fashion:

Health officials on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation are stressing prevention after eight residents were diagnosed with swine flu.

It’s the next paragraph that gives me the heebie-jeebies:

Officials have no idea how widespread the infection is because after the eight cases were confirmed, laboratory testing by the Indian Health Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the state of Montana is no longer being done.

Why ever the heck not? One would think that testing would be a priority, especially given that the state’s only death from swine flu occurred on the Fort Peck Reservation.

We’ll be following up on this.

Gwen Florio

Tags: buffalo post, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Fort Belknap Reservation, Fort Peck Reservation, H1N1 influenza, Indian Health Service, Native American news, Swine flu