I have been a little overwhelmed this week. First, remembering Alvin Josephy. His voice from Iwo Jima, 1945, on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition lit up my computer and cell phone screens with messages from across the country. I listened, played it for others, sent a notice out to blog followers… and then dipped back to my own memories of my times and my learnings from the man I still call my friend and mentor.Read Rich’s Post →
For all his faults, and the sputtering end to his tenure as President, Joe Biden, with the help of his strong Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, has been a big and positive presence in Indian Country. In the last flurry of pardons and commutations, Biden sent Leonard Peltier home to serve out his days in home confinement, after over 50 years in prison for a crime he says he did not commit. Peltier was convicted in the murder of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1965. He admitted to being a member of AIM, the American Indian Movement, and to being present at the confrontation, but has always denied he did the shooting. Tribal and world leaders have long called for Peltier’s release; Biden did it.
The question now is how much of the work that Biden and Haaland have done in Indian Country will stand up—and how much of past legislation involving Tribal issues will survive.Read Rich’s Post →
I thought I should follow up the last blog post, a musing—and hope—that there will be Natives sprinkled across government no matter the new regime. And I should have added that the sprinkling will be in local and state as well as the national government, and that the watering of Native knowledge and values will continue to go beyond government.
Why?
The fine work of the Biden appointees in high positions will leave a mark. Many Natives they brought into government and programs they started and fostered will still be here. Read Rich’s Post →
President Biden, with Secretary of the Interior’s Deb Haaland at his side, has been, in the words of Levi Rickert (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation), the founder, publisher and editor of Native News Online, the “best American President” for Native America and Native Americans.Read Rich’s Post →
I hope everyone saw President Biden’s passionate apology to Native people for the awful, almost 100-year, practice of boarding schools. They were another misguided attempt to deal with what became known as “the Indian problem.” Which might be translated as removing the original peoples from their lands. It couldn’t be solved with diseases, displacement, treaties and wars, so legislation and forced assimilation became the answer. And breaking the generational chain of passing language and culture from grandparents to parents to children to grandchildren was the boarding schools’ weapon.Read Rich’s Post →
I have mentioned Deb Haaland and her heroic work on behalf of US Tribes and Tribal people on a few blog posts—not enough praise, I’m sure, but I try. But now, as President Biden leaves the stage and the world begins to assess his impact on US history and politics, and, indeed, on world affairs, I think it is a good time to acknowledge what he has done for Tribes and Tribal people.
I have not been a fan of all Biden policies and appointments, but on this one I am sure. Biden has been good for Indians. I get Native support in this from “Native News Online,” a wonderful chronicle of what is happening in Indian country (free to subscribe; just google it). Editor-publisher Levi Rickert lists a number of Biden appointments, judicial nominations, and policy statements, and declares Biden “the best president for Native Americans in history.” That’s powerful words, and especially powerful Native words.Read Rich’s Post →
I’m privileged, I tell visitors to the Josephy Center, to be at this place in this time, riding a wave of good feelings and sympathies for Native Americans. We see the Yuroks buying and rehabbing land in Northern California, managing for wild flora and fauna and education, reintroducing giant condors, contracting to revegetate the lands left in the wake of dam removal on the Klamath River. I listen to Nez Perce Tribal leaders negotiate with US officials over dam removal on the Snake River. We read books of indigenous history and culture by Indian professors at Yale and Harvard—places and subject matter deemed important in those illustrious history departments only recently. We watch Lilly Gladstone, the Blackfoot-Nez Perce actress, playing a starring role in a historical drama about the insane and greedy plots and the killings of Osage women to steal their oil inheritances in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” We marvel at Deb Haaland, the first Native cabinet secretary in history, as she seeds the Department of the Interior with Native talent—and, importantly, brings the disgraceful practices of the Indian Boarding Schools to national attention.Read Rich’s Post →
It’s hard to get a handle on it. So much has happened in and for Indian Country since Biden took office and appointed Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) Secretary of the Interior. Haaland had held tribal offices, headed the New Mexico State Democratic party, and had served in the US House of Representatives before she became the first Native American to be a US Cabinet secretary. She knew the ropes, and she hit the ground running.Read Rich’s Post →
I received a response to my blog post about Deb Haaland and cooperative management of government lands. The writer was Roger Amerman, currently “USFS Native American Outreach and Recruitment Specialist” on the Clearwater and Nez Perce National Forests.
Roger is enrolled Choctaw, but married to a Nez Perce woman and living on the Nez Perce Reservation. He tells me that in his (Choctaw) culture, children are raised in the culture of the mother. Roger is dutifully raising their son a Nez Perce man.Read Rich’s Post →
The Joe Biden and Deb Haaland team have done remarkable things in Indian Country. There have been the boarding schools investigation, the appointments of tribal figures to key government posts, the saving of Bears Ears, and then the Grand Canyon National Monument this week!
And–as we live tight against ancient Nez Perce lands, many managed by the US Forest Service, I thought I would reach back and remind you of this effort at joint management. Maybe it will come our way someday soon!Read Rich’s Post →
I’m often surprised to find out that friends who follow political and cultural affairs closely still do not know who Deb Haaland is. With a hint, some of them come up with “oh yes, Department of Interior, isn’t it?” But her position and her presence are not front and center in their minds.
Things are different in Indian Country. When Haaland visited Idaho a year ago to turn over the federal keys to the Dworshak National Fish Hatchery to the Nez Perce Tribe, it was a big celebration. I said to a Nez Perce friend that Deb Haaland is some kind of saint. “Yes,” she said, “and superwoman.”Read Rich’s Post →
There is much worrying and gnashing of teeth at today’s election. I am tired of the daily solicitations for money from my liberal allies—it seems that once you have given to one political person or cause the money seekers from that edge of politics find you and torment you with requests for more. I am sure my conservative friends get the same treatment. Yet, the amounts of money raised by all sides in the current election cycle means that it works, no matter how offensive many of us at our far ends of the money-raising lines find it.Read Rich’s Post →
My friend Betsy Marston of “Writers on the Range” just wrote a wonderful tribute to Elouise Cobell.
Elouise Cobell was, I am ashamed to say, a new name to me. Maybe I had heard it—I was vaguely aware of the lawsuit that consumed her working life. But I had not remembered it. And now Betsy tells us that Montana will celebrate “Elouise Cobell Day” on November 5.Read Rich’s Post →
It’s something new—and mostly good—every day. Today, in Native News Online, we learn that:
“600 people attended the Tribal Language Summit at the Oklahoma City Convention Center to hear from leading educators and policymakers in Indian Country on how to protect, preserve and promote America’s Indigenous languages.Read Rich’s Post →
I met my first women doctors and agricultural engineers when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Turkey almost 60 years ago. This year, when I went back to Turkey for a short visit, I learned that an Islamist leaning regime has not stopped women from being doctors and engineers, graduate students and professors. And this morning I read about the women leading a revolution in Iran.Read Rich’s Post →
Friends texted and emailed me this yesterday to tell me that Mary Peltola, a Yup’ik
Alaskan Native, had won election in her state for the short remainder of a congressional term. She’ll run again for a full term in the fall. Even the short term marks a win for the Democrats, for women, and for Natives. And I will add her name to the celebratory list of Native achievements and achievers that I seem to be assembling—Chuck Sams, head of the National Park Service; Jaime Pinkham at the Defense Department; Shelly Lowe at the National Endowment for the Humanities; Marilynn Malerba, Treasurer of the United States; and Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior.Read Rich’s Post →
“HARBOR SPRINGS, Mich. — The second stop on the Road to Healing tour by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland (Bay Mills Indian Community) will visit the lands of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians in the northern part of the Michigan’s Lower Peninsula on Saturday, August 13, 2022.
“The Road to Healing is a year-long tour across the United States to provide survivors of the federal Indian boarding school system and their descendants an opportunity to share their experiences. The Road to Healing tour began at the Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, Okla. on July 9, 2022.”
……
I was in Portland a couple of weeks ago for a mini family reunion. My brother lives in Portland now, and my sister drove up from Sacramento. We were celebrating a granddaughter/niece going to Japan on a student exchange, and other, younger, grandchildren just for being who they are.
My siblings are all retired, but I am still working. Having worked in non-profits most of my life, with a 12-year hiatus running a bookstore that didn’t bring much profit, I work because I have to. But I also work because I want to, because I learn something new every day, and because my work with Native Americans is amazingly rewarding.Read Rich’s Post →
As President Biden adds to his growing list of significant Native American appointments across the Cabinet and in Executive Branch positions, Deb Haaland, his first major Indian appointment, as Secretary of Interior, looms large and iconic as the head of the team. And its cheerleader extraordinaire. Two weeks ago she was at Dworshak Dam in Idaho, lauding a deal to give control of a steelhead and salmon hatchery to the Nez Perce Tribe. Yesterday she posted on Instagram, noting the transfer of 1,000 acres of ancestral homeland in the Tully Valley in Central New York returned to the Onondaga Nation.
Haaland leads the band of Native leaders appointed by President Biden. This week’s blockbuster appointment was Marilynn “Lynn” Malerba, who is chief of the Mohegan Tribe, as Treasurer of the United States. Chief Malerba is the first ever Native American to hold this position. The Treasurer directly oversees the U.S. Mint, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and Fort Knox. And her signature will soon be on the country’s currency!
Out in the countryside, like places in rural Idaho and Oregon, Tribal leaders are contributing to federal, state and local policy and programs. Here we see it in land acquisitions, water policy, and revived cultural practices. The Nez Perce Tribe has made purchases and received donated lands in Wallowa County, and the 320 acre Wallowa Nez Perce Homeland site near the town of Wallowa boasts a wildlife and fish enhancing “side channel” designed and built under the auspices of Nez Perce Tribal Fisheries.
On the other side of the Cascades, the Fish and Wildlife Commission recently agreed to a “framework agreement” with the Coquille Indian Tribe, giving it more power in fish and wildlife management throughout a five-county area of Southwest Oregon. In Northern California, the Yuroks are acquiring land in huge chunks in the Klamath watershed, managing it for wildlife, fish, vegetation and education.
These things—and Haaland’s leading, cheerleading, and her immediate huge steps to investigate the terrible Indian Boarding School chapter in our history—all warm my heart, and, as far as I can tell, are applauded by a wide swath of Americans of different political affiliations.
Closer to me personally, I was lucky to see an old high school friend this weekend and learn a little of his Indian story. Our Oceanside, California class of 1960 missed the 60th reunion due to Covid, so someone decided to throw a combined 80th birthday party (we’ve mostly turned 80 or are about to). One of our number, a fine high school athlete we all thought part Indian, showed up for the party—he’d missed the 50th so I had not had a chance to talk with him since my own work became heavily focused on Indian affairs. And he talked—telling us that an aunt was digging into ancestral Native roots, that his ties included Native cousins among our classmates we thought “Mexican,” and that his Native family passed down one of the street names in our town. Thoughts that had remained hidden for most of his 80 years.
I told him that when I went back to the fiftieth reunion, I had met Gordon Johnson, enrolled on the Pala Reservation and the author of a collection of newspaper essays called Fast Cars and Fry Bread: Reports from the Rez. A California friend had sent me the book, which intertwines Mexican and Indian stories and peoples in Southern California. I asked Gordon what it was like growing up Indian in the 40s and 50s. “If you were light,” he said, “you passed as ‘white’; if you were dark, you said you were Mexican. Indians were at the bottom of the heap.”
It would have been nice to know that history and the culture and stories of our Native classmates and the many Indian tribes scattered across Southern California when we were in school. Would we have applauded it? Or were we caught in the embrace of a country still trying to get rid of its Native population one way and another, mostly through “assimilation” and the “termination” of Tribes in those Eisenhower years?
Indians today, Natives, Indigenous Americans are speaking up—and the rest of us are listening. To Deb Haaland and National Parks Chief Chuck Sams, to National Endowment for the Arts Director, Shelly Lowe, and we are listening to old friends and classmates who can finally tell their own stories with pride.
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Things are moving so quickly in Indian Country that it is hard to keep up. But I thought that anyone interested in this blog will be especially interested in Interior Secretary Haaland of the Laguna Pueblo Tribe, and Jaime Pinkham of the Nez Perce Tribe, came together at Dworshak Dam to celebrate the transferral of the fish hatchery, which was constructed in 1969, and has been co-managed by the tribe for the past 18 years, to the Nez Perce Tribe.Read Rich’s Post →