By
from The New York Times
And that’s a problem — especially for Native American women, and especially in rape cases.
Source: Opinion | This 19th-Century Law Helps Shape Criminal Justice in Indian Country
Tag Archives: indian law
Where North Dakota’s Voter ID Controversy Stands
The state is embroiled in a battle over Native Americans’ ability to vote under a law the Supreme Court just let take effect.
In a recent post, (Historic Moment) The Repatriation Files outlined how several court cases were in the works to dramatically improve the voting situation in Indian Country, where the right to vote has always been difficult to exercise. Unfortunately, a new decision by the Supreme Court threatens to make this November’s election yet another one in which Native voters are treated as second-class citizens.
“The state has acknowledged that Native American communities often lack residential street addresses. Nevertheless, under current state law an individual who does not have a ‘current residential street address’ will never be qualified to vote.”
Diné (Navajo) voters registering in 1948. Native voting was barred in several states until the Voting Rights Act.
Source: A Look at Where North Dakota’s Voter ID Controversy Stands
Indigenous News, Summer 2018
While events in Indian Country sometimes make the front page of major newspapers and online news outlets, many important items remain buried in the back pages or distributed only on specialized web sites. Here are just some of things that happened over the summer in the lives of indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere:
Tribal canoes converge on Tacoma for songs, stories and renewal of culture
The News Tribune of Tacoma, WA reports that the Puyallup Tribe of Indians welcomed some 120 canoes from a variety of tribal nations to the Salish Sea this July as part of the Tribal Canoe Journey event that takes place every year, featuring an itinerary that begins in the Puget Sound and ends at the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia.
Canoes from more than 108 tribes and nations make their way through Commencement Bay.
Since 1989, when only 20 boats participated, the event has grown steadily, representing the many tribes’ contributions to the region. This year canoe from as far away as Alaska made the trip to Tacoma. The theme of this year’s journey, “Honoring our Medicine,” was chosen to underscore the tribal communities’ efforts to heal both their own nations and the environment that share with non-Native peoples in the coastal Northwest.
ReadMore: https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article215683535.html
Narragansett Elder Eleanor Spears Dove celebrates her 100th Birthday
On August 1, 2018, Eleanor Spears Dove turned one hundred!
Interior Department: Mashpee tribe doesn’t qualify for land in trust
“After more than two years of legal uncertainty, the U.S Department of the Interior on Friday found that it could not keep land in trust for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe “
TV Show ‘Anaana’s Tent’ Teaches Kids Inuktitut Language And Inuit Culture
“We did some research and thought maybe we could use it as a positive tool to help us strengthen language, knowledge and cultural identity.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/09/15/anaanas-tent-inuktitut-english_a_23527607/
The Laissez Faire Ethics of Global Culture Brokers
Investors in indigenous art anxiously awaited last week’s auction of the Rainer Werner Bock collection of Native Hawaiian materials. Gathered over a twenty-year period, it numbers some 1000 items, ranging from pounding stones to medicine bundles.
A visit to the online auction catalog of the esteemed French auction house Aguttes yields page after page of objects, each within its own little well-lit, immaculately photographed rectangle. Here, a huge run of grinding stones dating to the 18th century; there, a “stone medicine bowl,” its dating and method of “collection,” uncertain. The sale last week contained items of great historic interest as well, including a spear said to have been collected by Captain Cook during his third expedition in 1779/80, and a flag from the Hawaiian monarchic period.
Hawaiian flag, Monarchy Period (c. 1795-1893).
But where the avid collector of “antiquities” sees bargains and objet d’art to decorate a home, others find evidence of a forced diaspora of the stuff of Kanaka Maoli life.
One item in particular caught my eye, a “ceremonial bundle” from the nineteenth century. Is a religious utensil art? How was it acquired? If one community wishes to treat their religious objects as museum pieces, must all others?
Needless to say, not everyone was happy with the proposed sale. Native Hawaiian Edward Halealoha Ayau took a day off from sightseeing with his family on a European vacation to picket the auction house. When reached by phone on Hawaii’s KITV Island News, Ayau explained, “All we are asking is for the sellers to provide us with documentation that demonstrated that these were legitimate Hawaiian objects that were collected lawfully. . . . All we asked them to do was to prove the provenance of these items, ‘prove that you had informed consent to collect them, and if you have then you are free to do with them as you please.’”
All we are asking is for the sellers to provide us with documentation that demonstrated that these were legitimate Hawaiian objects that were collected lawfully
This is not the first time that a prestigious Paris auction house has been embroiled in controversy over trafficking in indigenous cultural objects.
Back in 2013, the Néret-Minet Tessier & Sarrou auction house in Paris put into bidding a collection of rare Hopi and Navajo ceremonial masks whose provenance was unclear. When concerned tribal members tried to take the auctioneers to court, French legal authorities held that the Hopi tribe had no legal standing in France. From the point of view of some outside observers, this ruling meant that the Paris market in antiquities had become “a safe haven for any indigenous cultural property.” The auction netted $1.2 million. 70 of these masks remain in private hands.
Later that year, another Paris dealer offered yet another set of masks, but this time, as the LA Times reported, “the L.A.-based Annenberg Foundation phoned in anonymous bids, landing 21 Hopi masks and three sacred Apache headdresses for $530,000, in order to return them to the tribes.” http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-native-american-hopi-sacred-mask-auction-paris-20140627-story.html
In 2016, Indian Country Today featured an interview with Tlingit Athabascan artist Crystal Worl, who was in Paris for an exhibition of her work. Once again, art dealers in the French capital were auctioning off Hopi masks. Among the lots were also a set of Haida and Tlingit ceremonials items. Worl joined other protesters outside the auction house, explaining to ICT reporter Dominique Godrèche,
My grandmother wanted me to be there; she knew what the Tlingit items meant. So I joined the protest, standing outside, holding signs. Hoping that this protest would reach the buyers, and they would give back the pieces to the community. We want them, because we are striving, as a culture . . . . [S]tanding there, at the auction, and seeing my ancestors was frustrating . . . I went to the Northwest coast room to see the objects, and they saw me: I wanted them to know that we are there for them, and we will wait for them. Their cultural value is essential to us: stories are related to each object, passed on to the next generation. All the pieces contain the spirits of the ancestors who created them. There is no Tlingit word for art, as our ceremonial objects are living beings. So this event was unfair; the items are our ancestors, they belong to our communities.
I went to the Northwest coast room to see the objects, and they saw me: I wanted them to know that we are there for them, and we will wait for them.
Chrystal Worl (second from left) and others protesting in Paris. (Indian Country Today, Csia-Nitassin)
Yet amidst this seemly wholesale disregard for indigenous cultural sovereignty, there is still some good news to report. The April 5-7 auction did not go well for Aguttes. As Thomas Admanson of the Associated Press reported last week, “only two of the least valuable lots sold for 10,455 euros ($11,134). The auctioneers believe “buyers apparently were scared off by a protest . . .”
Because the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) does not cover items in private collections, and is not recognized outside the U.S., Article 31 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People offers guidance on how these issues should be handled in the global art marketplace:
Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs, sports and traditional games and visual and performing arts. They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions. 2. In conjunction with indigenous peoples, States shall take effective measures to recognize and protect the exercise of these rights.
When courts and ethnics guidelines fail, it becomes the work of everyday people like Edward Halealoha Ayau and Crystal Worl—really all of us—to remind others of their responsibilities to the living cultures of the indigenous world.
Canaries in the Coal Mine
Among the flurry of executive orders signed by the President over the past few weeks, several targeted Native American communities. From the infamous border wall project to the ill-conceived Dakota Access Pipeline, the President affirmed his commitment to assaulting tribal sovereignty and environmental justice.
Verlon Jose, the leader of the Tohono O’odham Nation on the Arizona/Mexico border spoke for many people in Indian Country when he said, “over my dead body will a wall be built.”
Although some might think of the border wall and the Dakota Access Pipeline as “Indian” issues, it and others like it affect all Americans. That’s because what happens in Indian Country does not stay in Indian Country.
We have a vital concern with Indian self-government because the Native American is to America what the Jew was to the Russian Czars and Hitler’s Germany.
For nearly two centuries Native communities have been the staging area for federal policies and practices that would later be turned on the nation as a whole. Educational ideas were tried out on Native children—the Lancastrian monitorial method, the industrial school model. National water projects flooded Indian valleys.
Toxic runoff on Ft. Berthold Reservation, Montana.
National forest clear cutting denuded Indian hillsides. Nuclear weapons testing irradiated indigenous dunes and mesas; uranium mining for those same weapons scarred Indian Country’s mountains and poisoned its water.
Last summer, Duane Champagne, Professor of American Indian Studies and faculty member of UCLA’s School of Law, recalled Felix Cohen’s famous comment (made now a half-century ago) that Indians were like the canaries in the coal mine of American democracy. Given the events of the past few weeks, Cohen’s observation seems especially prescient.
Even more startling than his canary analogy is the context in which he made it.
Margene Bullcreek, opponent of toxic waste dump.
It was in the Yale Law Journal, in an article titled “The Erosion of Indian Rights, 1950 – 53” that Cohen forged this startling connection:
We have a vital concern with Indian self-government because the Native American is to America what the Jew was to the Russian Czars and Hitler’s Germany. For us the Indian tribe is the miner’s canary, and when it flutters and droops we know that the poison gases of intolerance threaten all other minorities in our land.
Intolerance. That’s the extra something that sharpens federal policy into the point of the spear in Indian Country. In North Dakota, the federal government was very slow to acknowledge and protect the civil rights of protesters. It essentially turned a blind eye to intolerance. Native people were denied hotel rooms because of their ethnicity. They were gassed and beaten in a way that no middle class white American has been. They were showered with rubber bullets, freezing water, and set upon by attack dogs all while the Obama administration did little on their behalf. It was only in the waning days of his presidency that Obama instructed the Justice Department to take a closer look at what was going on in Morgan County. Although Attorney General Loretta Lynch did eventually send Justice officials to the field to survey the situation, with the new administration, even those slim protections have been lifted and an aggressive BIA police force installed at Standing Rock to intimidate its residents.
BIA policeman beating a man on the Cheyenne River Reservation, February, 2017. [http://nativenewsonline.net/currents/cheyenne-river-sioux-tribe-reacts-bia-police-brutality/]
With the protection of state’s rights as its new role, the federal government has turned a blind eye to state legislation that is clearly, and maliciously, directed at Native people—with no other policy goals than intimidation and intolerance.
A case in point is North Dakota House Concurrent Resolution 3017. In January, when the new president took office, North Dakota legislators attempted to pass a bill that essentially made the old 1950s federal policy of “termination” (exactly the law Felix Cohen was discussing when he made his canary analogy) a model for the state’s relationship with its indigenous citizens. Like most Indian-directed legislation, it pretended to have the best interests of Native people at heart:
A concurrent resolution urging Congress to modify the Indian reservation system by vesting the states with the ability to engage in relations with Native American tribes and with the responsibility of developing plans to improve the failed Indian reservation system, advance and elevate the quality of life on Indian reservations, promote and increase literacy on Indian reservations, and help Indian reservations to achieve economic stability and independence.
The events in North Dakota, along the border of the Standing Rock reservation, on the Cheyenne River reservation, and in the Tohono O’odham homeland should worry non-Indians. Its is a short step from Indian Country to the “inner city,” and from there to suburbs and shopping malls. Native Americans are once again seeing the sweeping suspension of civil rights that happens when the government promotes the interests of the few over the objections of those it brands as alien, un-American, other. They know, perhaps better than the rest of us, that being Indian is just the beginning. Ask the Nisei, American citizens who, in the 1940s, found out they too were “Indians” and that they too could be herded into reservations “for the duration.”
Fracking in Indian County, North Dakota.