For over twenty years the great Apache war chief Geronimo was held as a prisoner of war by the United States government at Ft. Sill in Oklahoma, dying in 1909. He was buried there, in a cemetery reserved for Apache prisoners of war. On the 100th anniversary of his death, his ancestors filed suit for his remains, arguing that his spirit cannot be freed until he is permitted to return home:

The suit, which names US President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates among the defendants, seeks “to free Geronimo, his remains, funerary objects and spirit from 100 years of imprisonment at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the Yale University campus at New Haven, Connecticut and wherever else they may be found.”

The remains would be returned to Geronimo’s wilderness birthplace in the western United States for a true Apache burial, a key facet of the native American tribe’s culture.

“The spirit is wandering until a proper burial has been performed,” Harlyn Geronimo said.

“The only way to put this into closure is to release the remains, his spirit, so that he can be taken back to his homeland in the Gila Mountains, at the head of the Gila River,” in what is today the state of New Mexico, Geronimo said.

“Hopefully, the people we have named in our suit will take this seriously … Hopefully, they will seriously consider our request to release the remains and perform a correct burial in the Gila wilderness,” said Geronimo, stressing that the burial ritual is one of the most sacred rites in the Apache culture.

One of the defendants is the legendary secret society at Yale, Skull and Bones, members of whom claimed to steal remains from Geronimo’s grave in 1918, an event that may (or may not) be apocryphal.

In 1990 Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, in an effort to make up for hundreds of years of grave robbery and destruction by archaeologists, thieves looking for treasure or trinkets, and developers. The Act would seem to apply in this case, though I don’t have detailed knowledge of how it’s been employed. It’ll be interesting to see what a federal court thinks of the matter.

More on how the stimulus will impact Native Americans. This time the focus is on the very poor Navajo reservation.

In case you’ve got a business you’re looking to start up, Mark Cuban might be willing to help you out…if you follow his rules.

Also, DART is hosting a job fair for Native Americans on Thursday. In the interest of spreading the word, full details are pasted below:

Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) and Urban INter-Tribal Center of Texas/Employhment & Training
Hosting a Career Fair for Native Americans
Thursday, February 12, 2009
5 p.m. – 8 p.m. at
Urban Inter-Tribal Center
209 East Jefferson Boulevard
Dallas, Tx 75203

Bring several copies of resumes. Dress for interview.
On-site testing/interviews will be available for essential positions.

5:00 p.m. – Dinner Served (Free Indian Tacos served on a first come first serve basis)
5:30 p.m. – Presentations DART/UITCT/American Indian Community Leaders

For further information, contact Donya Battiest 214-749-3304; contact Stephanie Villanueva 214-941-1050, x208

It appears to part of the stimulus package presently being cobbled together on Capitol Hill is aimed at bettering the prospects of Native Americans, many of whom on reservations have been mired in their own recession for about a hundred years now:

The Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday included $2.8 billion for Indian tribes in its portion of the nearly $900 billion economic stimulus bill, and a House version to be voted on Wednesday includes a similar amount. That includes hundreds of millions of dollars for schools, health clinics, roads, law enforcement and water projects.
Dante Desiderio, an economic development policy specialist at the National Congress of American Indians, which has lobbied for the money for the past year, calls the bill a “once in a lifetime opportunity” for tribes.

“It really has the potential to lift our communities out of poverty,” Desiderio said.
Indian Country has a long way to go in terms of reviving tribal economies. According to the National Congress of American Indians, real per-capita income of Indians living on reservations is still less than half the national average, unemployment is twice that of the rest of the country, and eight of the 10 poorest counties in the United States are on reservations.

That group originally asked for $6.1 billion in the stimulus, an amount that they said would generate more than 50,000 jobs.

“It’s not going to allow them to catch up, but its a significant boost,” said North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee who inserted the money into the stimulus. “This is a group of Americans who have been left behind in many of the basic needs of life.”

$2.8 billion is a lot of money to a desperately poor people, and it gives many tribes a chance to do things that can bolster the economies on reservations for years to come.

Californian Tribes are pressing the Obama administration to appoint Native Americans to the federal judiciary, but getting more Natives to go to law school is a necessary-and so far mostly untaken-first step. 

Sam Bradford, Heisman winner and “Cherokee” hero. See my comment at Crank’s place for my, probably predictable, reaction. 

“Conservatives” (if by which you mean, apologizers for genocide) have taken up a new Thanksgiving tradition; defending their white ancestors from slanderous claims that they were somehow responsible for what was presumably the entirely unintentional killing of millions of Native Americans (via Sadly, No!):

Columbus Day? The start of a vicious subjugation. A Denver Columbus Day parade was marred last year by protesters who threw fake blood and dismembered dolls along the parade route.

Plymouth Rock? Weren’t the Native Americans here first after all? The 400th anniversary of the landing at Jamestown was renamed from celebration to “commemoration” in 2007 because “so many facets of Jamestown’s history are not cause for celebration.”

Medved, a passionate but not blind patriot, argues that our kids and the rest of us are being fed a tendentious history that wildly exaggerates the offenses of European settlers. The notion that “America Was Founded on Genocide Against Native Americans” cannot withstand scrutiny.

Like racism, genocide is a word that has lost its meaning through promiscuous overuse. Medved reminds us that the international “Genocide Convention” defines genocide as an act or acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such.” In the clash of civilizations between European settlers and Native Americans, millions died. But the overwhelming majority of those deaths were attributable to diseases carried involuntarily by Europeans and spread to natives who had no natural immunities to these pathogens. That is a tragedy, but not a crime.

What of those smallpox-infested blankets that have received so much press? Medved examines the evidence and concludes “The endlessly recycled charges of biological warfare rest solely on controversial interpretations of two unconnected and inconclusive incidents 74 years apart.”

There were terrible injustices and massacres committed by Europeans against Native Americans and some running the other way as well. The more technologically advanced civilization prevailed — which is the usual course in human affairs. But the current fashion to distort that history into something like a war crime is, to say the least, overstated.

So essentially, if it can be proven that some white settlers somewhere didn’t actually pass diseased blankets onto Natives, then clearly, they have no complicity in the fact that millions of Natives died in the process of having their land taken away from them.

This is beyond ridiculous. No one with half a brain who’s ever read even one high school history textbook thinks that European colonists and their American (north and south) descendants didn’t deliberately and purposefully take the land away from the people already living here, enslaving and killing them in the process. That’s because that’s obviously what happened, and only a fool can possibly argue otherwise. Only a tiny minority think that these settlers have any complicity for what were unintentional (though certainly not unwelcome) deaths of millions by virulent diseases like smallpox, and so arguing against such beliefs and proving that they didn’t happen doesn’t somehow also undermine the proposition that what took place is what we now would certainly refer to as genocide and ethnic cleansing. There are simply no other words appropriate to describe the brutal enslavement, mass murder, relocation and constant warfare that followed for hundreds of years after the settling of the New World.

Note on nomenclature: Either American Indian or Native American is generally accepted by natives, but we generally use the shorthand term Indian. I will do so here just because it’s so much easier than typing either of those phrases.

How many Hollywood movies do you know of that are about or prominently feature Indians? There are really plenty, a few of which I’ll name here. Most recently there was Pathfinder. Not long ago, there was Windtalkers. Longer ago there was Dances with Wolves or Last of the Mohicans. And further in the past there were Little Big Man and A Man Named Horse. This page has a pretty decent list of films like this.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to start bashing these films. Well, maybe Windtalkers. John Woo is hit-or-miss with me and I really thought that movie was kind of silly, but I liked the others well enough. Anyway, back to my point. In respective order, here are the stars of those films: Karl Urban, Nicolas Cage, Kevin Costner, Daniel Day-Lewis, Dustin Hoffman, and Richard Harris. See a pattern yet? If not, let me help you. Urban is from New Zealand while Daniel Day-Lewis and Richard Harris are English. Nicolas Cage is Italian-American, so unless there’s some incidental contact through Hoffman and Costner, none of the leads of those films are Indian. That’s not to say that Indians don’t play prominent roles in those films, or that they’re disrespectful of Indian people. Well, let me say they’re not necessarily trying to be disrespectful, although a certain degree of historical inaccuracy is to be expected.

But seriously, once in a while I want to see a big historical epic about Indians with Indian actors as leads. You do see this from time to time, although more often on TV than a big screen movie. You might recognize these three guys:

From top to bottom, that’s Russell Means, Wes Studi, and Adam Beach. You can see all these guys in lots of films where it matters that they’re Indians, and many where it doesn’t. But you won’t see them as the lead in any major Hollywood film. Wes Studi was in Heat, but not really a main character. Adam Beach was in Flags of our Fathers, although mainly because that role required an Indian, and Russell Means is pretty much the go-to guy for an Elder.

I realize this is a problem for all the minorities in America. I go to the Asian Film Festival of Dallas every year and I hear the Asian-American actors they invite to speak talking about how difficult it is to find roles for Asian-Americans in Hollywood films. Believe it or not, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle was a big deal. But there’s not a film like that for Indians. I think the closest we got was with Lou Diamond Phillips in Renegades (which co-starred Kiefer Sutherland) because he claims to be an 1/8th Cherokee. Or perhaps Thunderheart with Val Kilmer, since his stepfather is Hopi or something.

Why are we treated this way? It’s not insulting that we don’t have actors put in films, it’s insulting that the films that are about us don’t star Indians!

Evidently Obama’s position on the Cherokee Freedmen issue has won him some support among Native Americans, according to this article on TheHill.com.

According to Obama’s advisers and supporters, a number of states might go Democratic in this year’s general election because of Native American votes. They cite Montana, a state where more than 6 percent of the population is Native American. It has voted Republican in the last several presidential campaigns, but Obama trails McCain by an average of only seven points, according to polls monitored by RealClearPolitics.

Another example cited by Obama’s supporters is North Carolina. While its population is only a little more than 1 percent American Indian, it is seen as a swing state where Obama might be able to edge out a narrow victory.

For more about the Cherokee Freedmen, check out our old posts on it here. To find out what the Cherokee Nation has to say about it, go here.

Obama of course does not condone the position of the Cherokee Nation to disenfranchise the descendants of the Freedmen. He does, however, view it as an internal matter and says the tribe is within its rights to take this action. He opposed a movement by the Congressional Black Caucus to basically sever the US’ relations with the Cherokee Nation. They argue that the issue is a matter of treaty rights rather than tribal sovereignty. The Cherokee Nation characterizes their proposed bill as “tribal termination”. As disgusted as I am with their actions, I have to agree that this is a precipitous and unwise decision by the CBC. Obama is right in saying that this is a matter internal to the tribe. He doesn’t agree with it and neither do I, but tribal sovereignty must be respected. At least, it must if you care to see the nation survive. I’ve read comments elsewhere suggesting that many were angered enough by this decision that they wouldn’t mind seeing it dissolved.

This editorial in Indian Country Today discusses the issues raised by this controversy and says that part of the problem is the inherent racism of the blood quantum system forced on us by the federal government:

I agree with Sen. Obama in that the Cherokee freedmen should continue to be recognized by the tribe but that the decision should come from the Cherokee Nation. He put it this way: ”Our nation has learned with tragic results that federal intervention in internal matters of Indian tribes is rarely productive – failed policies such as allotment and termination grew out of efforts to second-guess Native communities. That is not a legacy we want to continue.”

As our world becomes smaller, tribal nations will find that we have tribal members with African, European, American and even Asian descent. Tribal sovereignty must be respected and, as Sen. Obama has said, the tribes must not be interfered with in their process of determining membership. But the termination policies of the past, including blood quantum, must be abolished or they will continue to divide and conquer our communities, family by family.

It is time for us to make a change. It is time to for our tribal nations to evolve, back.

Damn straight.

Law students have a “ghetto party” and all hell breaks loose, but a New York interior designer dresses his man-help as Native American “warriors” and apparently nobody takes issue with it. At the very least the bozo could’ve hired some real Natives to wear real warrior dress and carry real weapons, but I suppose that might’ve made a few people uneasy.