austin
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Mar 31, 2015 23:47:35 GMT -5
Post by austin on Mar 31, 2015 23:47:35 GMT -5
Most of the news from Indian country is usually very sad and gets buried so the government can continue to persecute these people in the most horrible fashion.
Maybe we can search and find some good news.
The tragedy of Leonard Peltier is still at the top of my list.
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Apr 2, 2015 22:53:25 GMT -5
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Post by Deleted on Apr 2, 2015 22:53:25 GMT -5
Federal Judge Says South Dakota Officials Violated Native American Families' Rights
MARCH 31, 2015 6:26 PM ET
Two of South Dakota's largest tribes won a sweeping victory in federal court that could reverberate for tribes across the country.
A federal judge has ruled that the state Department of Social Services, prosecutors and judges "failed to protect Indian parents' fundamental rights" when they removed their children after short hearings and placed them largely in white foster care.
According to the suit, some of the hearings lasted less than 60 seconds. The suit says some parents were not allowed to speak at the hearings or in some cases hear why their children were being removed.
"In the past four years alone, hundreds of Indian children have been forcibly removed from their homes and subjected to these judicial hearings," says Stephen Pevar, a staff attorney with the ACLU which brought the case along with South Dakota attorney Dana Hanna on behalf of the Oglala Sioux and Rosebud Sioux tribes.
"It's no wonder that the social services won a hundred percent of those hearings," he says. "All the cards were stacked in their favor."
Congress passed the federal Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 in an effort to keep native families and tribes together. It mandates that the state place native children with their relatives or tribes if they have to be removed from their parents.
But in South Dakota that hasn't always happened. More than 80 percent of native children are placed in white foster homes. In 2011, NPR found that the state was routinely placing children in non-native homes, even when native homes and relatives were available.
One of the biggest complaints of native families who lost children is that they were never allowed to present their side.
Federal Chief Judge Jeffrey Viken agreed with them, writing, "Indian children, parents and tribes deserve better."
South Dakota state officials declined to comment. Tony Venhuizen, chief of staff to Gov. Dennis Daugaard said in an email, "We would decline to comment on pending litigation."
The Department of Social Services did not respond to requests for comment.
Abbie Smith, a government affairs associate for the National Indian Child Welfare Association, says the ruling will change the way courts nationwide treat these cases.
"It sets up a road map for other areas in the country where we know there is disregard for the rights of parents and tribes," Smith says.
"I take literally thousands of phone calls a year from parents and tribes, grandmas and aunties who describe to me court hearings that sound as if they were lifted out of the transcript that was included in the complaint in this case," she says. "A victory like this in South Dakota will send a message loud and clear that these laws and these civil rights are not optional."
Chase Iron Eyes is a staff attorney with the Lakota people's Law Project which has been fighting this issue in the state for more than 10 years. He says grandmothers and relatives who were denied custody of their grandchildren feel vindicated.
"We have a right to the control and wellbeing and development of our children," he says. "Our basic existence depends on them."
Pevar says the tribes will work with the Department of Justice and the courts to develop guidelines for South Dakota and other states as well. He says they will take up a final piece of the lawsuit — the Department of Social Services and its training of employees — next.
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austin
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Apr 3, 2015 20:43:26 GMT -5
Post by austin on Apr 3, 2015 20:43:26 GMT -5
I would hope all of the children are returned to their families. There was enough removing their culture from them long ago.
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Apr 19, 2015 19:53:55 GMT -5
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Post by Deleted on Apr 19, 2015 19:53:55 GMT -5
Puget Sound Business Journal Friday, April 17, 2015, 1:43 pm PDT
First Native American-owned cancer center opens in Fife
By Annie Zak
The Puyallup Tribe of Indians made history this week when it opened the Salish Integrative Oncology Care Center, the first American Indian-owned cancer care center in the U.S., according to the tribe.
The 8,200-square-foot center in Fife launched operations Monday. The tribe recently purchased the Seattle Cancer Treatment and Wellness Center, which used to be a clinic in Renton, and rebranded and relocated it to a new spot at 3700 Pacific Highway E., in the Trans-Pacific Trade Center.
The tribe purchased the Trans-Pacific Trade Center in June for $11.9 million, according to the Tacoma News Tribune. That money came from revenues from Emerald Queen Casino, according to the Tribune, and other "various tribal enterprises."
Salish Integrative Oncology will combine naturopathy and traditional Native American treatments with traditional oncology practices such as chemotherapy.
Tribe members and non-tribe members will be able to seek care at Salish. Part of the goal is to expand cancer care among the American Indian population because of that integration of cultural tradition.
"The Puyallup Tribe, who has operated the Puyallup Tribal Health Authority since the early 1970's, wants to build upon the established proven success record that mixes traditional and natural healing," said Kim Sunner, an administrator who previously worked at the Seattle Cancer Treatment and Wellness Center and now works at the Salish Integrative Oncology Care Center, in a statement.
The new center might also help to close the health care gap for Native Americans. Nonprofit Washington Health Alliance's 2014 annual report on disparities in health care found Native Americans as a population have one of the highest rates of health disparities in Washington state.
American Indians on Medicaid in Washington state get fewer breast, colon and cervical cancer screenings than whites, Hispanics or Latinos, Asians, African Americans, Native Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders, according to the WHA report.
This follows the Cowlitz Tribe in November buying a building in Tukwila to expand tribal health.
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Apr 27, 2015 18:55:19 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Apr 27, 2015 18:55:19 GMT -5
April 15, 2015
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) introduced a bill on Tuesday that supports efforts to place a woman on the $20 bill. S.925 directs the Department of Treasury to create a citizens panel to recommend a woman for the bill. Shaheen said she was inspired to take action by the Women on 20s campaign. “Our paper currency is an important part of our everyday lives and reflects our values, traditions and history as Americans,” Shaheen said in a press release. “It’s long overdue for that reflection to include the contributions of women. The incredible grassroots support for this idea shows that there’s strong support for a woman to be the new face of the twenty dollar bill.”
The non-profit group behind the effort welcomed Shaheen's support. Although Congressional approval is not required to put a new image on the $20 bill, executives said they want to ensure the public stands behind the idea. “Before we take this proposal to the White House, we want to make sure that the mandate is overwhelming,” executive director Susan Ades Stone said in a press release. “This vote of approval from a member of Congress will hopefully help further raise awareness of our campaign and send our numbers through the roof.”
The group is asking the public to choose among four women whose achievements make them strong candidates to appear on the $20 bill. The list includes Wilma Mankiller, who was the first woman elected to lead the Cherokee Nation. Mankiller, who died in 2010, wasn't originally a contender for the group's final ballot. But her consideration is significant because former president Andrew Jackson, who appears on the $20 bill, forced the Cherokee people and other tribes to walk the Trail of Tears away from their homelands.
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May 1, 2015 2:02:03 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on May 1, 2015 2:02:03 GMT -5
April 30, 2015
The Native American expert from that controversial Adam Sandler movie says that he walked off the set the moment he realized the film had no intention of respecting the Apache heritage he was supposedly hired to help maintain.
Bruce Klinekole, an Apache hired as the film’s “Native American cultural consultant,” was one of nearly a dozen actors who left the set of Sandler’s new Netflix movie, The Ridiculous Six. Explaining his actions in an interview with Indian Country Today Media Network, Klinekole, who said he was hired specifically to work on Apache scenes, said that not only did the film openly mock Native American culture, they also repeatedly rebuffed him when he attempted to point out the insults.
“I wasn’t allowed to talk to a producer and they wouldn’t allow me to talk to anybody,” Klinekole said. “They wouldn’t let me do anything. Nothing.”
According to Klinekole, many of the changes were subtle, though blatant enough to anyone raised Apache:
“Males were dressed in buckskin, which is not Apache at all. They were fixing up their hair into braids and Apache do not wear their hair in braids—It is straight and we wear our hair in a hat or with a headband. Some of the men were wearing feathers and Apaches do not wear feathers at all.” “The ladies were also in buckskin and were wearing boots that looked like they were purchased from the curio shops called ‘The Running Indian.’ They were wearing chokers. I was kind of overwhelmed, and I said, ‘What is going on here?’” He also noted that a tipi constructed for a wedding scene was completely sacrilegious, the equivalent of putting a disco ball in the Sistine Chapel:
When I saw the tipi, they not only had a front door, but they also had a back door. I said, ‘What? What is this back door stuff?’ They also had flowers and vines and stuff all over the tipi and they had fake eagle feathers on each one of the poles. I said, ‘What is going on here?’” “I talked to the guy who was designing this, and asked ‘Who told you to do this?’” Klinekole said. “He said he had been to sweats, and this is not how a tipi should look, and I said ‘You’re right.’ He said, ‘I’m just going by what they told me to do.’ I told him, ‘this is a total disgrace.’” Most importantly, he had objections to the names of two of the female characters in the film: Beaver’s Breath and Wears-No-Bra. “We would never ever call women by those names. It was a total disgrace.”
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May 6, 2015 18:33:25 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on May 6, 2015 18:33:25 GMT -5
Native American Actors Work to Overcome a Long-Documented Bias By CARA May 4, 2015
Late in April, after Native American actors walked off in disgust from the set of Adam Sandler’s latest film, a western sendup that its distributor, Netflix, has defended as being equally offensive to all, a glow of pride spread through several Native American communities.
Tantoo Cardinal, a Canadian indigenous actress who played Black Shawl in “Dances With Wolves,” recalled thinking to herself, “It’s come.” Larry Sellers, who starred as Cloud Dancing in the 1990s television show “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” thought, “It’s about time.” Jesse Wente, who is Ojibwe and directs film programming at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, found himself encouraged and surprised. There are so few film roles for indigenous actors, he said, that walking off the set of a major production showed real mettle.
But what didn’t surprise Mr. Wente was the content of the script. According to the actors who walked off the set, the film, titled “The Ridiculous Six,” included a Native American woman who passes out and is revived after white men douse her with alcohol, and another woman squatting to urinate while lighting a peace pipe. “There’s enough history at this point to have set some expectations around these sort of Hollywood depictions,” Mr. Wente said.
The walkout prompted a rhetorical “What do you expect from an Adam Sandler film?,” and a Netflix spokesman said that in the movie, blacks, Mexicans and whites were lampooned as well. But Native American actors and critics said a broader issue was at stake. While mainstream portrayals of native peoples have, Mr. Wente said, become “incrementally better” over the decades, he and others say, they remain far from accurate and reflect a lack of opportunities for Native American performers. What’s more, as Native Americans hunger for representation on screen, critics say the absence of three-dimensional portrayals has very real off-screen consequences.
“Our people are still healing from historical trauma,” said Loren Anthony, one of the actors who walked out. “Our youth are still trying to figure out who they are, where they fit in this society. Kids are killing themselves. They’re not proud of who they are.” They also don’t, he added, see themselves on prime time television or the big screen. Netflix noted while about five people walked off the “The Ridiculous Six” set, 100 or so Native American actors and extras stayed.
But in interviews, nearly a dozen Native American actors and film industry experts said that Mr. Sandler’s humor perpetuated decades-old negative stereotypes. Mr. Anthony said such depictions helped feed the despondency many Native Americans feel, with deadly results: Native Americans have the highest suicide rate out of all the country’s ethnicities.
The on-screen problem is twofold, Mr. Anthony and others said: There’s a paucity of roles for Native Americans — according to the Screen Actors Guild in 2008 they accounted for 0.3 percent of all on-screen parts (those figures have yet to be updated), compared to about 2 percent of the general population — and Native American actors are often perceived in a narrow way.
In his Peabody Award-winning documentary “Reel Injun,” the Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond explored Hollywood depictions of Native Americans over the years, and found they fell into a few stereotypical categories: the Noble Savage, the Drunk Indian, the Mystic, the Indian Princess, the backward tribal people futilely fighting John Wayne and manifest destiny. While the 1990 film “Dances With Wolves” won praise for depicting Native Americans as fully fleshed out human beings, not all indigenous people embraced it. It was still told, critics said, from the colonialists’ point of view. In an interview, John Trudell, a Santee Sioux writer, actor (“Thunderheart”) and the former chairman of the American Indian Movement, described the film as “a story of two white people.”
“God bless ‘Dances with Wolves,’ ” Michael Horse, who played Deputy Hawk in “Twin Peaks,” said sarcastically. “Even ‘Avatar.’ Someone’s got to come save the tribal people.”
Dan Spilo, a partner at Industry Entertainment who represents Adam Beach, one of today’s most prominent Native American actors, said while typecasting dogs many minorities, it is especially intractable when it comes to Native Americans. Casting directors, he said, rarely cast them as police officers, doctors or lawyers. “There’s the belief that the Native American character should be on reservations or riding a horse,” he said.
“We don’t see ourselves,” Mr. Horse said. “We’re still an antiquated culture to them, and to the rest of the world.”
Ms. Cardinal said she was once turned down for the role of the wife of a child-abusing cop because the filmmakers felt that casting her would somehow be “too political.”
Another sore point is the long run of white actors playing American Indians, among them Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson, Audrey Hepburn and, more recently, Johnny Depp, whose depiction of Tonto in the 2013 film “Lone Ranger,” was viewed as by detractors. There are, of course, exceptions. The former A&E series “Longmire,” which, as it happens, will now be on Netflix, was roundly praised for its depiction of life on a Northern Cheyenne reservation, with Lou Diamond Phillips, who is of Cherokee descent, playing a Northern Cheyenne man.
Others also point to the success of Mr. Beach, who played a Mohawk detective in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and landed a starring role in the forthcoming D C Comics picture “Suicide Squad.” Mr. Beach said he had come across insulting scripts backed by people who don’t see anything wrong with them.
“I’d rather starve than do something that is offensive to my ancestral roots,” Mr. Beach said. “But I think there will always be attempts to draw on the weakness of native people’s struggles. The savage Indian will always be the savage Indian. The white man will always be smarter and more cunning. The cavalry will always win.”
The solution, Mr. Wente, Mr. Trudell and others said, lies in getting more stories written by and starring Native Americans. But Mr. Wente noted that while independent indigenous film has blossomed in the last two decades, mainstream depictions have yet to catch up. “You have to stop expecting for Hollywood to correct it, because there seems to be no ability or desire to correct it,” Mr. Wente said.
There have been calls to boycott Netflix but, writing for Indian Country Today Media Network, which first broke news of the walk off, the filmmaker Brian Young noted that the distributor also offered a number of films by or about Native Americans.
The furor around “The Ridiculous Six” may drive more people to see it. Then one of the questions that Mr. Trudell, echoing others, had about the film will be answered: “Who the hell laughs at this stuff?”
A version of this article appears in print on May 5, 2015, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Actors’ Walkout, Anger Over Stereotypes . Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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orz
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May 11, 2018 13:41:33 GMT -5
Post by orz on May 11, 2018 13:41:33 GMT -5
The problem with movies is they like to pick out a time period when white men encountered Indians the most. The People inhabited these continents for way longer than the 1800s. I laugh at the term Indian Princess. There was no such station..she was just the daughter of a chief or leader. History centers on a few nations and tribes and overlooks the countless tribes scattered across the country. Movies usually ignore the fact that many of the western tribes were actually eastern ones pushed west by the colonists stealing their lands. What gets ignored too is that Indians were like every other human on earth since the beginning of time. You found gentle, kind, vicious, murderous, funny, clueless, greedy, lazy, addicted and every spectrum. There were warring tribes, advanced societal tribes, wandering tribes and the same governments like across the globe. In this area is a town called Sauk City. The adjoining is Prairie du Sac. When white men came here, they found an Indian city comprised of wooden homes, orderly streets and a thriving government and community of 1000. Not a bunch of wild people wearing skins and living in trees or holes. Hollywood likes to pick and chose on anything. Therefore the stereotype of buckskins, teepees,horses, buffalo hunts, feathers,arrows,war paint, breechcloths,( which ARE super sexy on the right man!)moccasins and lances. As part of being a buckskinner, one has to do research to get it right. And then find out the artwork, beadwork,leatherwork, cloth making, pottery, homes and all the rest. In this country, existed as many kinds as across the entire world. From the finest of silver and stone jewelry, to a dwelling utilizing the gifts of nature for that area....to weaving and making cloth...to gathering and sowing...the People learned the ways of the land to thrive into tribes of thousands. So I laugh at inaccuracies in all film and books. All rich Europeans didnt live in gorgeous castles filled with luxurious goods. Most lived in cold, dark, dank stone lumps that heated with smoking fireplaces and did their business in a bucket that got tossed out the window. All Africans were not Zulu warriors clad in lion skins. All Chinese women did not have bound feet. I honor the People in buckskinning. And those white men who followed the ways, beliefs and items they found to be the smartest way to exist in the wilderness they encroached on. I attended a powwow in the area for years. And found a welcome given to non natives that no other groups equal. What is sad is last year was the end of it. The people are getting older, the effort was getting overwhelming to host. And the young that need to carry it on, dont care. The fancy dancers now are allowed to wear lame,spangles and glitter in order to satisfy them to participate. The joke is that in the dance circle, I was one of the few that wore period correct buckskin dress. The true People want modern. That is the sad part of it all. As across the globe, history is cast aside. What people once saw as heritage to be honored is now considered old fashioned and useless. Cross the globe and see smartphones, t-shirts and Nikes.The world is fast losing that which made people unique and special.
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