Tribes Celebrated When This Region Became a National Monument. Now They’re Suing to Get It Back

Ryan Zinke, yet again, employs lying as a tactical move

Department of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke claimed [during his interview with Breitbart News Daily on 5/28/18] the Navajo people who “live close” to Bears Ears National Monument “were all in support” of President Donald Trump’s decision to shrink the protected land. But tribe representatives told us that’s false.

In fact, the Navajo Nation and other indigenous tribes have sued the federal government over the president’s decision.

Truth be told…

In the Bears Ears region of Southeastern Utah, there is an area of winding canyons known by Navajo people as Nahoniti’ino – or the hiding place. American Indians used the landscape to elude U.S. military troops in 1864, as thousands were being marched by gunpoint down to Fort Sumner in New Mexico. Hundreds died from hunger and exhaustion in what became known as the Long Walk, a brutal chapter that five tribes highlight in a lawsuit they recently filed against President Donald Trump. [Five Tribes Fought for Bears Ears National Monument. Now they are Suing the Trump Administration | TIME]

Fernando Cly, 40, is a tour guide in Monument Valley, a tribal park that stretches across the Utah-Arizona border inside the Navajo Nation. Tour guides there are Navajo and make their living from tourism in the area. In arguments over monuments, opponents often highlight economic activity that might be lost from restrictions on logging, mining and other industries. Proponents, in turn, highlight the revenue that will come from new visitors. Ryan Shorosky for TIME

 

Realities Most of Us Do not Face | Internet Access and Digital Communication on Indian Reservations

This is especially true in the Great Plains and the Southwest

The Navajo phrase for cell phone is “bil n’joobal’,” or “something you use while spinning around in circles.” The phrase is based on the description of someone spinning around with a phone, trying to get good reception.

Navajo also use the phrase “hooghan bik bil dahjilwo” to describe a cell phone, or “something you use when you run up the hill.”

[This year, the Federal Communications Commission reported that 41 percent of Americans living on tribal lands lacked access to broadband; that number leaps to 68 percent for those in rural areas of tribal lands.

In 2015, the Obama Administration instituted the ConnectHome effort, a project to bring high-speed Internet to a list of rural areas including the Choctaw Nation. Since the dawn of these efforts, the number of connected American Indians has nearly tripled.]

Relative progress isn’t enough, however, and transformative change is far from swift. Terrain, accessibility, population density and poverty are some of the reasons.

Read the full story | ARSTECHNICA

Also:

Native Americans Get Cheaper Mobile Phones

 

 

Reservation Blues | Sex Trafficking for Drugs

[POPLAR, Montana, May 17 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Life on the remote Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northern Montana has all the ingredients for sex trafficking – poverty, isolation, joblessness and violence, topped with an epidemic of crystal meth addiction.

Drug users are selling their babies, daughters and sisters for the potent stimulant that is ravaging Native American communities such as the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes living on the desolate plains of Fort Peck, say community leaders, experts and federal authorities.

“We’re in crisis mode,” said Tribal Chairman Floyd Azure. “We have mothers giving their children away for sexual favors for drugs. We have teenagers and young girls giving away sexual favors for drugs.”

No numbers record specific rates of local sex trafficking, which can often be buried in crimes of sexual assault, abuse, prostitution, abandonment or kidnapping. But it is a crime, poorly documented and fuelled by drug abuse, plaguing Indian reservations across the United States.

The rate of meth use among American Indians is the highest of any ethnicity in the country and more than twice as high as any other group, according to the National Congress of American Indians.

The number of drug cases on Indian lands nationwide rose seven-fold from 2009 to 2014, and crime rates on some reservations are five times higher than national averages, according to a federal Drug Enforcement Administration report…..

A harrowing number of victims are trafficked by their own family members.

“Traffickers are not just scary men who drive around in Cadillacs in their leather trench coats,” said Healey.

“A trafficker can be a parent or guardian. A trafficker can be an aunt or an uncle or it can be a boyfriend or another friend.”

The often close relationships between abuser and abused present a web of problems such as forcing victims to leave home for their protection, experts said.

Victims may fear the community and authorities won’t believe them and will instead defend the trafficker, said an Indian Health Service social worker who did not want to be identified.

“Nobody wants to go after a family member,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation…..]

Read the full story | Thompson Reuters Foundation Group

Tribal elder Tommy Christian lives on Montana’s Fort Peck Indian Reservation which is looking for ways to combat issues of drug abuse and sex trafficking, Poplar, Montana, April 28, 2016 | THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION/Ellen Wulfhorst

 

Ansel Adams as a Defender of Constitutional Rights

An issue photographers face when shooting on federal lands, including national parks and monuments, is that they must pay a fee, otherwise the commercial use of these photographs is not legal. There are other implications outside the realm of photography purely in itself, as –this is only one example– journalists consistently have been scrutinized for documenting police officers in action. With the introduction of the Ansel Adams Act in Congress on 1 January 2015, First Amendment rights are being addressed. Esquire has a detailed article on this subject.

Representative Steve Stockman [R-TX-36] referred to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and in addition to the Committees on Natural Resources, Agriculture, and the Judiciary.

The Mighty Bison of Yellowstone | A Chasm Between World Views in an America so Divided

[Justin Farrell’s book, a sociologist at Yale’s school of forestry and environmental studies, is due out this summer, under the full title The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict. He spent two years asking folk in and around Yellowstone why they are so cross. Beneath debates about science and economics he found arguments about morality and the proper relations between humans and nature—though those involved often do not, or will not acknowledge this. In short, all sides purport to be weighing what is true and false, while really arguing about right and wrong.

Read the full article | THE ECONOMIST

Everything You Need To Know To Attend The Biggest Climate March In History

For one week in late September, New York City will be the center of gravity for the fight to confront climate change.

On Sunday, September 21st, a climate march through midtown Manhattan will kick off a week of high-profile climate events in the Big Apple. Promoted as an effort to bring unprecedented attention to climate change, the gathering comes just as as international climate negotiations ramp up in a major push toward a new global accord.

Read the full article here | Climate Progress

Native American Language Revitalization Legislation in the 113th Congress

Read the full article here | LSA

The LSA is currently engaged in a campaign to educate and inform members of the U.S. Congress about the benefits of Native American language revitalization. There are two bills currently pending in both houses of Congress which seek to enhance efforts to revitalize Native American languages:

• H.R.726/S.2299 Native American Languages Reauthorization Act of 2014
• H.R.4214/S.1948 Native Language Immersion Student Achievement A

High Tech and High Court

Adopting to the Times | US Supreme Court

(Reuters) – One U.S. Supreme Court justice referred to Netflix as “Netflick.” Another seemed not to know that HBO is a cable channel. A third appeared to think most software coding could be tossed off in a mere weekend.

These and other apparent gaffes by the justices during oral arguments have became a source of bemused derision, as tech aficionados, legal experts and others have taken to social media, blogs, YouTube and other outlets to proclaim the justices black-robed techno-fogeys.

 

Switzerland and Assisted Suicides

Switzerland and Assisted Suicides

Wesley J. Smith for First Things

When eliminating suffering becomes the “defining ends of human action,” it easily transforms into eliminating the sufferer. Perhaps more insidiously, what constitutes suffering encompasses more things—even becoming projected and anthropomorphized onto the natural world.                                                                                                                                                                                                                An elderly woman took her last flight to Switzerland from the UK because she was upset by modern technology and because she saw her suicide as a way of contributing to saving the earth from environmental destruction. There have also been joint suicides of elderly couples who don’t want to live apart. The Swiss Federal Supreme Court even declared a right to assisted suicide for the mentally ill.

 

04/29/2014: U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman Ruled that the State’s Voter ID Law Violates the Constitutional Rights of Minority and Low-Income Voters

The decision reads, in part:

“The reason blacks and Latinos are disproportionately likely to live in poverty, and therefore to lack a qualifying ID, is because they have suffered from, and continue to suffer from, the effects of discrimination….                                                                                                                                                                                                          The socioeconomic disparities between whites and minorities in Wisconsin are also traceable to the effects of discrimination in employment…. [Wisconsin’s voter ID law] only tenuously serves the state’s interest in preventing voter fraud and protecting the integrity of the electoral process, and therefore the state’s interests do not justify the discriminatory result.                                                                                                                                                                                                        Accordingly, the photo ID requirement results in the denial or abridgment of the right of Black and Latino citizens to vote on account of race or color.”

Read the original article in Mother Jones…