By Andrew Gobin/Tulalip News, photos by Nessie Hatch-Anderson
On Saturday, May 31, 122 five-man stick game teams competed in the Tulalip Tribes Stick Game Tournament for $50 thousand at the Tulalip Amphitheater. On Sunday, June 1, 110 teams competed in the three-man tournament to close out the weekend of stick games.
“We heard a lot of people, young and old, say they really enjoyed the event, and they look forward to coming to Tulalip every year,” said Nessie Hatch-Anderson. “Family tradition is what we heard for this event. It was a clean and sober event, and it’s a tradition that goes way back to our ancestors.”
Slehal, a lushootseed word for bone games, hand games, or stick games, is a traditional form of gambling. Historically, it was also used as a way to settle disputes without violence. One of the Snohomish origin stories, depicted on one of three poles at the Tulalip Resort, tells the story of the beginning of the world, and how the humans and the animals played slehal to decide who would rule the earth, both a gamble and a dispute. Slehal honors that tradition.
Generations are brought together through stick games. Nessie’s mother, the late Barbara Hatch (Ane-Cus), lived for traditional competitions, a passion that Nessie carries on.
“Stick games and canoe races, that’s what I remember growing up,” said Nessie.
Stick gamers that have gone on were remembered at the event.
Carrie Fryberg, who chairs the stick game committee, said, “We did an honor song to honor past stick game players that are very respected throughout Indian Country and the stick game community. Big Bill and Mimi Mclean, Louie and Cookie Moses, and many members of the Tom family, who sang their family honor song.”
1. The Tom family sings an honor song for past stick game players. Loretta Tom, Isadore “Dobie” Tom, Al Tom, and Vivian George Photo: Nessie Hatch-Anderson
On Saturday, Candace Tait and her team from Lummi took first, and $25 thousand cash prize. Cassandra Kipp’s team from Lapwai came in second, winning $15 thousand, Effie Wall’s team from Fort Dushaine took third and $7,500, and Kevin Seaward’s team from Duncan took fourth and $2,500.
2. 1st place $25 thousand winners, Candace Tait and team from Lummi. Commemorative drums made by Cy Fryberg Sr. He donated enough custom drums to be given to the members of each winning team. Photo: Nessie Hatch-Anderson
Al Tom’s team had an eight game winning streak, only to have upset in the championship bracket, taking fifth place and no winnings. They were only team from Tulalip to make it that far.
Mike Edwards and his three-man team from Muckleshoot won Sunday’s tournament.
The weekend was organized by the Tulalip’s Stick Game committee led by Carrie Fryberg.
Nessie said, “Carrie had everything organized pretty well. The weekend went very smoothly.”
Andrew Gobin is a staff reporter with the Tulalip News See-Yaht-Sub, a publication of the Tulalip Tribes Communications Department. Email: agobin@tulalipnews.com Phone: (360) 716.4188
Aerial view of Taholah’s Lower Village. Photo courtesy of Larry Workman
By Brandi N. Montreuil, Tulalip News
TAHOLAH – On March 25, the encroaching waters of the Pacific Ocean awakened residents in Taholah, Washington, when their aging seawall was breached and flooded sections of their Lower Village. Now, the village is faced with relocation due to changes in climate resulting in rising sea levels, tsunami threats, and flood danger from the Quinault River.
The ancestral home of the Quinault people is classified as a tsunami hazard zone by the Washington Emergency Management Division and is no longer considered safe. As a result, a comprehensive master plan is being implemented that would move residents and government structures 120 feet above sea level to the Upper Village.
The risks were identified years before when the Quinault Indian Nation undertook a comprehensive analysis of the coastline after increased flooding in the Lower Village. The analysis showed deterioration of the protective berm that separates the Lower Village from the ocean water. With each large storm the ocean encroaches further into the village, making relocation necessary. “We first thought it was rain water, but in 2009 we did a walk down to the ocean line and we discovered the ocean was encroaching much worse than we thought,” said Councilman Larry Ralston, Quinault Indian Nation Treasurer.
What was uncovered was the deterioration of a protective berm that separated the Lower Village from the ocean water and with each large storm, the ocean encroached further into the village, making relocation necessary.
“We did a risk management plan and undertook an emergency preparedness evaluation and it was determined that not only are we vulnerable to the ocean encroaching, but the footprint of our Lower Village is vulnerable to liquefaction, so if we had a large earthquake, the village could actually sink
Larry Ralston, Quinault Indian Nation Treasurer, stands in front of his mother’s house which will not be moved during the relocation of Taholah’s Lower Village, and could face possible demolition along with other buildings that cannot be moved. Photo/ Brandi N. Montreuil, Tulalip News
into the earth,” said Fawn Sharp, Quinault Indian Nation President.
President Sharp explained the safety of current and future Quinaults is the main priority. “We have a sacred trust and duty to those who are deeply connected to the land and their homes. It is a mix in which we have to plan carefully. We have over 1,000 residents and we have our major retail outlet, the Taholah Mercantile. We have our jail facility, courthouse, daycare and head start, and k-12 school so a number of our critical programs are located right in the heart of the village.”
“As of right now we are in the process of undertaking a feasibility study. The study will fully assess the infrastructure and the number of residents at risk, putting together a plan that we can then take to federal appropriators and members of congress, and other federal agencies in an effort to relocate the village,” said President Sharp.
Preliminary estimates for relocation cost are near $65 million and include the need to acquire land adjacent to the Upper Village, and the building of infrastructures including roadways, utilities, housing, and businesses. The loss of generational history that holds cultural relevance to the Quinault people is something that is also being considered, as is the risk of the “big one” hitting.
“As a resident of the Lower Village, we think about tsunamis more often than not. For a lot of us, we grew up listening to the ocean and we know what the weather is going to be like just by hearing the waves. You are always listening to the ocean to monitor what is going on,” said Ralston. “I am looking forward to the move, but I also know there are some houses that will be torn down like the one that my mother was born in in 1928. The worst case scenario if we don’t move everyone to higher ground, is that we get hit with a wave at two in the morning and we would only have two or three minutes to evacuate the Lower Village and we lose lives.”
Quinault elder James DeLaCruz Sr. stands by the recently reinforced Taholah seaswall, is among the handful of residents who do not plan to leave the Lower Village during Taholah’s relocation. Photo/ Brandi N. Montreuil, Tulalip News
With only two ways in and out of Taholah, the risk of liquefaction puts residents at a high risk during evacuation, as roads would be inaccessible. During the event of a tsunami wave residents have limited time to move to higher ground.
Tsunami warning systems in place in Taholah include a siren monitored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrator headquarters in Seattle. In the event of an earthquake or tsunami wave the siren will go off followed by a voice telling residents to evacuate. To date, the siren has only been used during monthly test drills.
“The benefit of the relocation will be knowing that our citizens are safe, said President Sharp. “The other benefit will be the planning process will have a lot of room to expand. We have a fairly large land base adjacent to the village that we are looking at developing. There will be opportunity to create space for building a private sector economy. We are getting direct input from our membership; if you could take just a blank space, how would you want to design a community? That is the exciting part of the planning stage. There are a lot of great ideas that are emerging from our citizens, and their vision and their view of what a future Taholah will look like.”
Although relocation is necessary, residents will not be forced to move. Some residents like Quinault elder James DeLaCruz Sr. knows he will not be relocating. His house butts against the seawall, and as he explains “The Lower Village has been a part of my life as long as I can remember and this is where my home is until nature changes that.
Taholah Mercantile, a Quinault Indian Nation enterprise, is the main, and only, source of perishable food shopping for residents in the Lower Village. It sits a block from the seawall and is at risk of flooding from rising sea levels. Photo/ Brandi N. Montreuil, Tulalip News
“We believe that every citizen has that right,” said President Sharp. “We will do our best to educate our membership about the risk. We will do our best to provide our citizens the options for relocation, but ultimately we will respect that individual citizen’s absolute right to live where the Creator put them and the lands that were given to our ancestors.”
“Our ancestors had to be good stewards of the land. We have done that here at Quinault,” said President Sharp. “Yet we seem to be paying the price for others who don’t share the same values. Our ocean is becoming acidic, the ocean is encroaching into our ancient homelands, and the glaciers that feed the upper Quinault River and our prized sockeye salmon are disappearing. So while we have been good stewards, we are paying a heavy price for other peoples mistakes.”
The Taholah Relocation Master Plan includes the Quinault Planning Development and Kaul Design Associates. A three-year planning process will be implemented in phases and include gathering information, needs and choices of the community, and final plan preparation.
Brandi N. Montreuil: 360-913-5402; bmontreuil@tulalipnews.com
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. —The last of the 29 Navajos who developed a code that stumped the Japanese during World War II has died.
DEAN HANSON / AP Navajo Code Talker Chester Nez in 2011 at his home in Albuquerque. Nez, the last of the 29 Navajos who developed an unbreakable code that helped win World War II, died Wednesday morning. He was 93. Nez was in the 10th grade when a Marine recruiter went to the Navajo reservation looking for young men who were fluent in Navajo and English. Nez told The Associated Press in a 2010 interview that he kept the decision to enlist a secret from his family and lied about his age.
Chester Nez, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, died Wednesday morning of kidney failure, said Judy Avila, who helped Nez write his memoirs. He was 93.
Before hundreds of men from the Navajo Nation became Code Talkers, 29 Navajos were recruited to develop the code based on the then-unwritten Navajo language. Nez was in 10th grade when he enlisted, keeping his decision a secret from his family and lying about his age, as did many others.
“It’s one of the greatest parts of history that we used our own native language during World War II,” Nez told The Associated Press in 2009. “We’re very proud of it.”
Of the 250 Navajos who showed up at Fort Defiance — then a U.S. Army base — 29 were selected to join the first all-Native American unit of Marines. They were inducted in May 1942. Nez became part of the 382nd Platoon.
Using Navajo words for red soil, war chief, clan, braided hair, beads, ant and hummingbird, for example, they came up with a glossary of more than 200 terms that later was expanded and an alphabet.
Nez has said he was concerned the code wouldn’t work. At the time, few non-Navajos spoke the language. Even Navajos who did couldn’t understand the code. It proved impenetrable.
The Navajos trained in radio communications were walking copies of the code. Each message read aloud by a Code Talker was immediately destroyed.
“The Japanese did everything in their power to break the code but they never did,” Nez said in 2010.
After World War II, Nez volunteered to serve two more years during the Korean War. He retired in 1974 after a 25-year career as a painter at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Albuquerque.
Nez was eager to tell his family about his role as a Code Talker, Avila said, but he couldn’t. The mission wasn’t declassified until 1968.
The accolades came much later, and the Code Talkers now are widely celebrated. The original group received Congressional Gold Medals in 2001, and a movie based on the Code Talkers was released the following year. They have appeared on television and in parades and routinely are asked to speak to veterans groups and students.
Nez threw the opening pitch at a 2004 Major League Baseball game and offered a blessing for the presidential campaign of John Kerry. In 2012, he received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kansas, where he abandoned his studies in fine arts after money from his GI Bill ran out.
Despite having both legs partially amputated due to diabetes and being confined to a wheelchair, Avila said Nez loved to travel and tell his story.
“He always wanted to go, he loved meeting people,” she said. “And with something like kidney failure, it comes really gradually. At the end, he was really tired.”
DEMING – The 306 people facing loss of Nooksack Indian Tribe membership are back in tribal court attempting to block the tribal council’s latest effort to oust them.
As recently as March 2014, it seemed as though the members of three threatened families -Rabang, Rapada and Narte-Gladstone – would get a reprieve from a tribal procedure known as disenrollment that began in early 2013. After a long and convoluted legal battle in Nooksack tribal courts, the Nooksack Court of Appeals ordered a halt to the disenrollment process until the tribal council could draw up an ordinance spelling out disenrollment procedures. Such an ordinance also would require approval from the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, the appeals court ruled.
But in mid- May 2014, the tribal council began sending out new notices to some members of the affected families, scheduling July disenrollment hearings before the tribal council under the terms of a 2005 tribal membership ordinance that received BIA approval in 2006. Ironically, the 2005 ordinance bears the signature of former chairman Narz Cunanan, a member of the Rabang family who is among those who could lose tribal membership.
In a new lawsuit filed May 30, 2014, in tribal court, Seattle attorney Gabe Galanda argues that the tribal council’s new disenrollment strategy does not comply with language in the March appeals court ruling, since the BIA has not approved any procedures since that ruling was handed down.
The lawsuit states that a tribal attorney confirmed the tribal council’s plan to conduct the disenrollment process under the terms of the older ordinance.
Now, Tribal Court Chief Judge Raquel Montoya-Lewis is being asked to decide whether that approach is a legally valid way around the Appeals Court’s ruling. In past legal opinions, Montoya-Lewis has tended to accept tribal attorneys’ arguments in favor of the tribal council’s sweeping authority to determine who is entitled to tribal membership and its many benefits. That authority has a firm legal foundation thanks to a 1978 U.S. Supreme Court ruling involving a New Mexico tribe.
If Montoya-Lewis does decide to uphold the tribal council’s position, the threatened families could go back to the tribal Court of Appeals to give those judges the opportunity to weigh in on whether a disenrollment process under the 2005 ordinance is in violation of their March 2014 appeals ruling.
The disenrollment controversy began in early 2013 after Nooksack Tribal Council Chairman Bob Kelly and a majority of other council members agreed that members of those three families had been incorrectly enrolled in the 2,000-member tribe in the 1980s, and their enrollments should be revoked.
Since then, members of the affected families have mounted a vigorous legal and public relations effort to retain their Nooksack membership. That membership entitles them to a wide range of benefits, among them fishing rights, health care, access to tribal housing and small cash payments for Christmas and back-to-school expenses.
Those facing the loss of tribal membership have based their membership claim on their descent from Annie George, who died in 1949. Members of those three families have introduced evidence that Annie George was Nooksack, but those who want the three families out have noted that George’s name does not appear on a list of those who got original allotments of tribal land or on a 1942 tribal census, and those two criteria determine legal eligibility for membership.
Even before the disenrollment process began, Kelly and his council allies pushed two other members off the council on grounds that they had missed council meetings, but the two contended they were targeted because they were members of the challenged families. Cash Christmas and school supplies payments also have been denied to the family members, and many of them have lost their jobs in tribal government or in the tribe’s two casinos.
While Kelly has refused comment on the situation, some of his backers in the tribe’s rank-and-file have spoken out in the past to praise Kelly for his actions. As they see it, the three affected families were outsiders with tenuous membership claims who should never have been admitted to the tribe to get a share of scarce tribal resources.
In tribal elections in March 2014, Kelly was reelected, despite a vigorous campaign against him by members of the three families and their supporters. The full results sent a mixed message: Two candidates who opposed the disenrollment also were elected. But the result left Kelly and his supporters with a 5-2 majority on the council.
The February 2013 edition of the official tribal newsletter, Snee-Nee-Chum, reported that the tribe’s 2013 revenue would add up to about $39.5 million, with about 24 percent of it coming from the casinos and smaller tribal enterprises.
(Chiloquin, Oregon)Saturday May 31 A long awaited General Council meeting was held at the Klamath Tribes Administration building that had been originally scheduled for Saturday May 17. The original meeting was rescheduled when the Klamath Tribal Council misinformed the public regarding accusations of “threats” toward Tribal Council. According to Klamath Tribal Councils press release, “some Klamath Tribes members have been campaigning to organize a hostile takeover of the meeting. Threats included chaining and padlocking doors to force the Tribal Council and meeting attendees to remove Gentry from the council and to overturn the results of a recent referendum vote.”
Klamath members were “wanded” and searched by security hired from Medford before entering the front doors, and asked to provide Klamath Tribal ID to Chairman Gentry’s wife, Mary Gentry, prior to entering the auditorium. Everyone was asked to sign in and wear a name tag. Signs were posted on the front door of the Administration building that read “video/audio recording is NOT permitted, unless specifically authorized by the Klamath Tribes.”
Approximately 100 eligible voting tribal members were in attendance, many who wanted accountability and answers from their elected officials regarding the recent illegal referendum that granted Chairman Gentry signatory authority to sign the “Proposed Upper Klamath Basin Comprehensive Agreement” on behalf of membership. This agreement, now called the “Klamath Water Recovery and Economic Restoration Act of 2014”, was introduced May 21st to Senate by Senators Wyden, Merkley, Boxer and Feinstein.
Every opportunity membership had to discuss the referendum was denied by Chairman Gentry at the General Council meeting. Though membership rights have been compromised by tribal negotiators, the outstanding concern Klamath tribal members have is that their elected leaders did not properly follow the laws of the Klamath constitution regarding a referendum vote. Throughout the meeting, the Klamath Tribal constitution, bylaws and Roberts Rules of Order were only acknowledged by Chairman Gentry when the rules benefited council and were denied when rules were invoked to conduct General Council business.
“This is a dictatorship!” exclaimed Ramona Mason a Klamath Tribal member.
When addressing Klamath Tribal Council regarding their disrespectful behavior toward membership, elder Heidi Kimbol stated,
“You all look very bad.”
Looks like court, not a general meeting of tribal members…
Klamath Tribes General Council meetings were established to give tribal members the power to discuss issues, make important decisions for their community and to conduct business accordingly. Only limited authority has been granted to tribal council and membership reserves majority sovereign authority to themselves.
But at Saturday’s meeting it was clear that the Klamath Tribal council has abused their authority, publically displaying their unethical treatment of the general membership. And membership finally had the opportunity to unify and vocalize how discontent they are with how their elected leaders conduct themselves.
The General Council meeting began at 10:00 am and finally ended at approximately 5:00 pm, commencing with Councilman Don Gentry’s wife, Mary Gentry, accusing a young woman of “stealing from the tribe.” When asked for clarification on what Mrs. Gentry was referring to, she stated the woman stole coffee cups from a previous public event, cups which were provided for any guests in attendance, free of charge.
Though security was originally hired to prevent a “hostile takeover” of the meeting, the only event where security needed to intervene concerned the Chairman’s wife, Mary Gentry, who was ranting, crying and shaking as she was escorted outside of the building.
TULALIP – Tulalip Tribes held their 23rd Annual Veteran’s Pow Wow on May 30 through June 1, at the Tulalip Resort Casino. The annual pow wow celebrates current and past Native American military servicemen and women.
Master of ceremonies was Tulalip tribal member Ray Fryberg Sr., with Sonny Eagle Speaker as arena director and Eagle Warriors as host drum.
Dancing styles included women’s fancy shawl, buckskin, and jingle while men’s dance included fancy feather, grass, and northern traditional.
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Brandi N. Montreuil: 360-913-5402; bmontreuil@tulalipnews.com
An engineering company based in Salem, Oregon, says it is close to deploying the first submerged wave power generator on the West Coast. M3 Wave Energy Systems plans a temporary deployment late this summer in shallow water off the northern Oregon Coast.
The concept here relies on wave pressure passing over acrylic pillows on the sea floor. That pressure compresses air in the pillows, which is then used to spin an electric turbine.
Mike Morrow, M3 Wave’s CEO, said the initial open water deployment will be a self-contained, 7′ x 30′ rectangle on the seafloor off of Camp Rilea near Astoria.
“It is smaller scale so it is not going to generate a huge amount of power,” he said. “It would be enough to power a small sensor array or marker beacon.”
The demonstration is planned to last two to six weeks starting this August or September. Longer term, Morrow foresees manufacturing larger devices in Oregon. The devices would probably be exported to power off-the-grid outposts or coastal communities with high electricity costs such as Pacific islands or in Alaska.
Morrow said government grants and private investors are financing the commercialization of this technology.
The steady, powerful pounding of the ocean surf along with supportive state governments attracted a plethora of energy developers to the Pacific Northwest over the past decade. But one-by-one, project developers have thrown in the towel as their funding ran low or West Coast utilities proved unwilling to commit to this type of renewable electricity at above-market rates.
M3 Wave has managed to survive the shakeout in the ocean renewable energy sector.
“One of the key things about M3 and our technology is that it does fit on the [sea] bottom. We took a very different philosophy,” Morrow explained. “There’s less energy on the bottom available — that’s just simple laws of physics — but we think it will be easier and more cost effective to harness that energy.”
Earlier this spring, New Jersey-based Ocean Power Technologies canceled its plans to deploy an array of ten wave energy buoys, which would have floated on the ocean surface near Reedsport, Oregon. A Scottish wave energy developer, Aquamarine Power, closed its Oregon office in 2011 citing uncertainty about seabed leases.
One of the other survivors in the ocean energy space regionally is Seattle-based Principle Power. It recently won a federal grant to test wind energy generation using turbines placed atop redesigned offshore drilling platforms. Principle Power is currently seeking permission to deploy such floating windmills offshore of Coos Bay, Oregon.
As an artist, collaborator and conservator, Tlingit master carver Tommy Joseph has been involved with many of the most important totem projects in Alaska over the past 20 years.
The short list includes the Indian River History Pole carved with Wayne Price, the Kiks.adi Memorial Pole and the much-photographed “Holding Hands” Centennial Pole, all in Sitka National Historical Park.
But the soft-spoken artist will address the brutal arts of war at the Anchorage Museum on Thursday, specifically the battle armor and weapons of the Tlingit Indians. It’s a subject he’s devoted special attention to over the last few years.
Master carver Tommy Joseph works on a helmet at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, Friday May 30, 2014. Known for his totems, he has recently done research on Tlingit armour.Master Carver Tommy Joseph from Sitka is in town doing workshops at the southeast site at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. He’ll give a talk at the Anchorage Museum on June 5. He’s famous for his totems, but has done a lot of research on Tlingit armor, which will be the subject of his talk. He’s working on a helmet right now. ANNE RAUP — Anchorage Daily News
Joseph’s totems can be found in England, New Zealand, at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh and in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs homeless shelter at Benson Boulevard and C Street in Anchorage.
One of the recent generation of artists finding new ways to explore totemic forms, he often incorporates unexpected or modern elements in his work. On a pole for the Family Justice Center in Sitka, there are young people wearing contemporary clothing. A rainbow is featured on the “Good Life” pole created for Sitka’s Pacific High School. A camera shutter can be discerned on the pole honoring the late Japanese photographer Michio Hoshino. Multicolored hands decorate his Census Pole, created to encourage participation in the 2010 U.S. census and which traveled across the state.
It may seem like a leap to go from items now considered ornamental — bowls, blankets, totem poles — to devices meant for killing. But before contact, Native Alaskans expected all tools to be both functional and decorated. War equipment was considered especially important and was especially well-decorated.
Joseph said he started to “seriously research” Tlingit battle gear in 2004, the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Sitka between the Russians, led by Alexander Baranof, and the Kiks.adi clan, led by Chief Katlian.
“There wasn’t a whole lot available online or in books,” Joseph said. “So I decided to do the research myself.”
He began with the collections at the Sheldon Jackson Museum in Sitka, where the raven-shaped battle helmet worn by Katlian in the fight against the Russians is kept, and the Alaska State Museum in Juneau. He got a grant to explore the holdings at the Burke Museum in Seattle. Then a Smithsonian fellowship that let him look over items held in several East Coast museums.
An award from USA Artists let him travel to Europe, where he visited the British Museum, several Russian museums and “I’m not sure how many museums in Paris.” He photographed the pieces, examined them and “picked ’em apart in my mind.”
With an individual artist grant from the Rasmuson Foundation, he re-created the weapons and armor he’d studied and mounted a solo show at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau last year. “Rainforest Warriors” featured six mannequins in full battle gear along with assorted artifacts and paintings.
The traditional war equipment in Southeast Alaska bears a striking resemblance to that worn by the ancient Greeks as described in Homer’s “Iliad.” Fighting was close and hand-to-hand, with copper knives the primary tool. The blades jutted forward and backward, Joseph said, and were held in the middle. In place of a second blade, some of the knives had a blunt pummel, often carved in the form of an animal head.
Other weapons included copper-tipped spears, war clubs with heavy bone heads and nasty-looking, laboriously carved jade spikes up to 16 inches long.
“They were like a miner’s pick,” he said, “for whacking skulls.”
Wood and leather served for armor. The most prominent piece — the one most commonly displayed in museums — was the helmet, often decorated with a human or animal face. It came down to the eyebrows. A bentwood neck collar was attached to the rear of the helmet and held in place with a mouthpiece clinched in the teeth.
The body was protected with the heaviest of hides — moose, bear or sea lion, sometimes in multiple layers. Joseph has seen examples with hides as much as a half-inch thick. “It was like our modern day Kevlar,” he said. Vertical wooden slats were strapped to the leather, typically in top and bottom halves, some reaching halfway down the warrior’s legs, which could also be guarded with slat leggings.
Musket balls could bounce off such armor, Joseph said.
Joseph said some of what he discovered in his research came as a surprise.
“We were told that war helmets were always, always made from a spruce burl,” he said. The rock-hard knot is difficult to split even with a maul. “But I found some that were made from straight grain — and some were maple,” a non-Alaska wood that would have been acquired via trade with tribes in present-day British Columbia or Washington.
“One that really surprised me was made of red cedar,” he said. “That’s a soft wood.”
The maker of a cedar helmet covered it with animal hide, however, to reinforce it, much as modern plastic-foam bike helmets are sometimes covered with a light nylon skin.
Joseph was born in Ketchikan in 1964 and has lived in Sitka for most of his life. He said he became interested in traditional art when a carver presented a workshop on making halibut hooks for his third-grade class.
Last week it was Joseph who was teaching apprentices how to make such hooks at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. He was also working on a new war helmet at the center’s Southeast site.
After his talk about battle gear this week, he’ll stay in Anchorage to do conservation work on one of his poles that recently came into the museum’s possession.
He doesn’t often come to Anchorage. Only coincidental gaps in timing with various other projects permitted him to make an extended visit this year. Among other things, his Sitka studio, Raindance Gallery, is slated for expansion, in part to accommodate the popular workshops he conducts there.
And yes, if you need a Tlingit war helmet, you can buy one at the gallery. Though his in-depth study of Tlingit weapons is only about a decade old, they’ve been an object of artistic interest for some time.
The Kiks.adi pole, for instance, carved in 1999, has a frog at its base, the clan symbol of the Tlingit leader Katlian. The frog appears to be holding a raven in its lap.
A closer look shows that it’s a replica of Katlian’s helmet.
The Office of Hawaiian Affairs was just in the news because its CEO, Kamanaopono Crabbe, wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry asking for a legal opinion on Hawaii’s sovereign status. One of the key questions raised in the letter is “Does the Hawaiian Kingdom continue to exist?”
I will leave it to others to answer that question, but, supposing the Kingdom coexists with the State of Hawaii, what tax and public finance implications can we expect?
Throughout its history, the U.S. government has had to coexist with independent sovereign entities known as Native American tribes. During this time, rules and procedures have been adopted allowing both to exist with a fair amount of autonomy and dignity for each. The Akaka Bill aimed to reconstitute a Native Hawaiian governing entity and then have it recognized by the federal government the same way Native American tribes are.
Typically, tribes have space set aside within a state, which we call a “reservation.” On the reservation, the tribal government not only provides governance, but also provides the services necessary to maintain a civilized society. Those services, like any others provided by any other government, need to be paid for. So the tribal government has the power to impose taxes upon those living on the reservation. Those on the reservation pay tribal taxes, not state or federal taxes. But neither the state nor the federal government is obligated to provide the reservation with infrastructure, police, fire protection, a militia, or anything else people typically look to government to provide.
By the same token, anything off the reservation is part of the state. An individual living off the reservation, even though ethnically or otherwise a member of a tribe, is considered a state resident and pays federal and state taxes like any other resident. This makes sense because that person is a beneficiary of the services and society provided by the federal and state governments, and should pay for those services like any other person living there.
The same theories apply for the island possessions of the United States, such as Guam and American Samoa. Each island has a government that imposes its own tax and provides its own services. For example, those living in Guam pay Guam tax, while ethnic Guamanians living in the U.S. pay federal and state taxes.
Applying these concepts to the Native Hawaiian situation raises familiar issues. The Kingdom of Hawaii currently has neither a monarch nor anything generally recognized by its members as a government. That’s why the Akaka Bill proposed, and the Native Hawaiian Roll Commission is moving toward, a process for getting a number of Native Hawaiians together and having them organize themselves.
Once that happens, however, some kind of dedicated space is needed for the nation-within-a-nation model to work. We certainly hope that no one is thinking the citizens of the reconstituted Kingdom living on state lands, and taking advantage of the benefits and services offered by the state and federal governments, will then claim they don’t have to pay for them. That’s simply not reasonable. People paid taxes in the old Kingdom, and those in the reconstituted Kingdom shouldn’t expect something different. We all need to be aware that both benefits and burdens flow from being a part of civilized society.
Tom Yamachika is interim president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii.
As challenges against the name of the Washington Redskins have persisted for more than four decades, the team’s ownership and management has held on to a consistent story: that the team changed its original name, the Boston Braves, to the Boston Redskins in 1933 to honor its coach, William “Lone Star” Dietz, who maintained at the time that he was a member of the Sioux tribe.
But in a 1933 interview with the Associated Press, George Preston Marshall, the team’s owner and original founder, admitted that the story wasn’t true.
“The fact that we have in our head coach, Lone Star Dietz, an Indian, together with several Indian players, has not, as may be suspected, inspired me to select the name Redskins,” Marshall said in the AP report. The quote was originally referenced in a story on the team’s name at Sports Illustrated’s MMQB site. Jesse Witten, the lead attorney in a lawsuit challenging the legality of the team’s federal trademark protection, unearthed the actual AP report this week, and provided it to to Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney. ESPN’s Keith Olbermann reported it on his show, “Olbermann,” Thursday night.
Here’s a copy of the news clip, which ran in the Hartford (Conn.) Courant on July 5, 1933:
The team’s owner, Daniel Snyder, and top management have justified the team’s name as an “honor” to Native Americans in letters to fans and the public. So too has NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. And both have leaned on the story that Marshall chose the name to honor Dietz to make that case.
As some of you may know, our team began 81 years ago — in 1932 — with the name “Boston Braves.” The following year, the franchise name was changed to the “Boston Redskins.” On that inaugural Redskins team, four players and our Head Coach were Native Americans. The name was never a label. It was, and continues to be, a badge of honor.
The team has also used Dietz’s heritage — and the claim that the Redskins were named in his honor — to defend itself in the lawsuits challenging its federal trademark.
The NFL, too, has rested its case on that history. Goodell did so in a letter to 10 members of Congress who wrote him to challenge the name last June. The commissioner called the name a symbol of “strength, courage, pride, and respect” and specifically referenced Dietz’s role in the name:
In our view, a fair and thorough discussion of the issue must begin with an understanding of the roots of the Washington franchise and the Redskins name in particular. As you may know, the team began as the Boston Braves in 1932, a name that honored the courage and heritage of Native Americans. The following year, the name was changed to the Redskins — in part to avoid confusion with the Boston baseball team of the same name, but also to honor the team‘s then-head coach, William “Lone Star“ Dietz.
Asked for their response to the news clip, neither the NFL nor the Washington Redskins responded by the time of publication.
Dietz’s history was already in question at the time thanks to the work of historian Linda M. Waggoner, whose exhaustive account of Dietz’s life found that he almost certainly was not a Native American, as he had claimed. In fact, Dietz faced a federal trial alleging that he had falsely represented himself as a Native American to avoid the World War I draft. After the first trial ended with a hung jury, Dietz pleaded no contest to the same charges in a second trial and served 30 days in jail.
When ThinkProgress asked the franchise about the claims that Dietz was not a Native American last year, the team’s president and general manager, Bruce Allen, called the questions “ignorant requests” and suggested that we speak to Dietz’s family instead.
Amid scrutiny about Dietz’s history, the team has given the appearance of backing away from relying on the claim that he inspired the name. Notably, Allen did not cite Dietz or the origins of the name in his written response to a letter from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and 49 other senators who called on the team to drop “Redskins.”
If Marshall didn’t choose the name based on Dietz or the presence of Native Americans, what was his reason? As Olbermann notes in his report, the team chose its original name — the Boston Braves — because it shared a field with Boston’s baseball team by the same name. Marshall explains the AP story that he gave up the name “Braves” because it was too easily confused with the baseball team, and he chose “Redskins” to keep the Native American imagery as the team moved away from the Braves and into Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox.
Until recently, that story was more commonly told than the one about Dietz. In 1972, freelance writer Joe Marshall wrote a story on team nicknames in a promotional program from a game between Washington and the Atlanta Falcons. Joe Marshall didn’t reference Dietz in his story, instead writing that the team wanted to “change names but keep the Indian motif”:
The Redskins also copied a baseball team, the Boston Braves. George Preston Marshall started with his team in Boston on Braves Field. When he switched playing sites, he wanted to change names but keep the Indian motif. Since he was now sharing a park with the Red Sox and at the same time liked Harvard’s crimson jerseys, Redskins seemed appropriate. Redskins they have remained, a proud tradition. Until now, that is.
In that sense, it seems obvious that the name “Redskins” was chosen more as a marketing ploy than anything else, a way to tweak the team’s name without changing the image it had established. Regardless of the original motive, however, this much is clear: the story the team and NFL have used to justify the name’s existence as a “badge of honor” is not true, and the man who founded the team refuted it himself more than 80 years ago.
Klamath members were “wanded” and searched by security hired from Medford before entering the front doors, and asked to provide Klamath Tribal ID to Chairman Gentry’s wife, Mary Gentry, prior to entering the auditorium. Everyone was asked to sign in and wear a name tag. Signs were posted on the front door of the Administration building that read “video/audio recording is NOT permitted, unless specifically authorized by the Klamath Tribes.”
