If you’re a sport fisherman, these are the good ol’ days. A record number of fall chinook are wending their way up the Columbia, providing catches of one to two chinook per rod at the mouths of the Cowlitz and Lewis rivers the past several weeks. Some 900,000 coho are due in Puget Sound, and are taking up the slack left by a big pink run. So many razor clams are available on the ocean beaches that state officials have decided to start the fall digging season early.
And on and on. If you don’t want to get bit by a fish, stay away from the water.
State Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist Joe Hymer, at the agency’s Vancouver office, said last week marked the largest fall chinook count (and still counting) since Bonneville Dam was built in 1938. The old record was a run of 611,000 fish in 2003, and this one is predicted to be somewhere in the 800,000-fish range.
Many of these big kings are “upriver brights,” headed for the Hanford Reach, and should be the basis for a gunnysack fall fishery in the area of the Vernita Bridge, upriver from the Tri-Cities.
Creel checks on the Reach last week showed 762 boat anglers with 244 adult and 132 jack chinook, but that success rate will improve rapidly.
Farther downriver, below the mouth of the Lewis, anglers made 5,654 trips on Sept. 6, 7 and 8, and nailed 5,351 kings for a success rate of 0.95 fish per rod. That’s unheard-of fishing on the lower Columbia.
On the local front, the annual derby for the blind was held Monday, and results bode well for this weekend’s big Everett Coho Derby. Jim Brauch, avid angler and an Everett Steelhead and Salmon Club member, hosted a derby participant Monday and limited out in Brown’s Bay on silvers of 5 to 8 pounds. He said 55 feet was the magic depth, and an Ace High fly the top lure.
“Other fish were caught throughout the system,” Brauch said. “The big fish contest was won by a nice 15-plus-pounder from the east side of Possession. (There’s) lots of fish from Mukilteo to the shipwreck and on the west side of Possession. I don’t know how many fish were caught, but all blind participants had at least one fish and most had more than one.”
Brauch said he also talked to anglers at Douglas Bar on the Snohomish River on Sunday. They reported coho as far up as the Highway 522 bridge.
Mike Chamberlain at Ted’s Sport Center in Lynnwood said there seems to be good numbers of silvers in the area, and that the derby should draw well. He said the fish are moving, not schooled up particularly, and that fishermen should cover a lot of water.
“Coho are where you find them, and hanging around all the rest of the boats can be counter-productive,” he said.
Chamberlain likes the Grand Slam Bucktail in green, and the Ace High fly in either chartreuse or green spatterback, or purple haze, behind a green or white glow flasher. The “Mountain Dew” series of Hot Spot flashers also are fish catchers, he said. Rig the flies 32 or 36 inches behind the flasher, and add a small herring strip.
There will be two free fishing seminars prior to the Everett Derby. The first is tonight — from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. — at the Tulalip Cabela’s Conference Center, where Ryan Bigley of Soundbite Sportfishing will share tips and tactics for advanced coho fishing in Puget Sound. Space is limited; RSVP by calling 360-474-4880.
The second seminar is scheduled for 7 p.m. Friday and features John Martinis of John’s Sporting Goods in Everett, with everything you need to know to fish the coho derby. The venue is Everett Bayside Marine. For more information, call Bayside at 425-252-3088.
In a first for this area, the Sportsman Channel and Comcast are teaming up with the Everett Derby to donate fish caught by participating anglers to help those less fortunate. The event is part of the Sportsman Channel’s Hunt.Fish.Feed. outreach program that taps an underutilized food source of game meat and fish donated by sportsmen to feed those struggling with hunger across the country.
Participating anglers from the Everett derby are expected to donate more than 1,000 pounds of fresh fish to the Volunteers of America food bank in north Everett.
Lots of clams
State shellfish managers are practically begging diggers to take razor clams off their hands, as the fall season arrives.
“We have a huge number of clams available for harvest this season, paricularly at Twin Harbors,” said Dan Ayres, the state’s coastal razor clam honcho. “There are only so many good clamming tides during the year, and we decided there was no time to waste in getting started.”
Ayres said that while the fall digging schedule is still being developed, managers saw no reason to delay a dig at Twin Harbors.
So Twin Harbors is open tonight through Monday. Tides are as follows: Today, minus 0.3 feet at 7:13 p.m.; Friday, minus 0.5 feet at 7:57 p.m.; Saturday, minus 0.5 feet at 8:39 p.m.; Sunday, minus 0.3 feet at 9:21 p.m.; and Monday, 0.0 feet at 10.04 p.m.
Ayres said estimates of coastal razor clam populations indicate some 800,000 more clams available for harvest this year than last. And last year saw 420,000 digger trips harvesting 6.1 million clams, for an average of just under the per-person limit of 15 per day.
And if 2013 is going to be better than that, it’ll likely get wild down there in the dunes.
For more outdoor news, read Wayne Kruse’s blog at www.heraldnet.com/huntingandfishing.
TACOMA – University of Puget Sound is pleased to announce a $25,000 gift from the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe that will help provide scholarships for Native American students pursuing their education at the national liberal arts college.
This is the first grant to Puget Sound by the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, which shares the college’s ambition to provide young people with broad access to a quality education that serves as a foundation for a successful career. The $25,000 gift will be allocated in scholarships to eligible Native American students attending Puget Sound.
“Young Native Americans in Washington have bold aspirations, but not always the family resources to ensure they can follow the paths they choose,” said Virginia Cross, chair of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe. “We hope to encourage more of them to commit to a high-standard college education so they can enter civic and business life in positions that will be a boon to their community and serve as a model for other young people.”
Puget Sound has attracted a rising percentage of students from diverse backgrounds for the past two decades. More than 20 percent of freshmen students in 2012 identified as being from groups traditionally underrepresented in higher education. In the 2012–13 school year, 55 Native American students attended Puget Sound.
To ensure that students can devote themselves to their studies, as well as take advantage of opportunities to participate in campus clubs, community work, and athletic and academic activities, Puget Sound currently offers financial aid to 94 percent of its students. Providing financial support for students is also a key target of the college’s current One [of a Kind] comprehensive campaign.
The Muckleshoot Indian Tribe places priority in awarding grants to organizations that address the unique local and regional issues faced by Native Americans. Awards range across areas including education, health, culture, arts, the environment, community advocacy, and communities of color.
A Washington family opens a hatchery in Hawaii to escape lethal waters.
Story by Craig Welch, Photographs by Steve Ringman, Source: Seattle Times
HILO, Hawaii — It appears at the end of a palm tree-lined drive, not far from piles of hardened black lava: the newest addition to the Northwest’s famed oyster industry.
Half an ocean from Seattle, on a green patch of island below a tropical volcano, a Washington state oyster family built a 20,000-square-foot shellfish hatchery.
Ocean acidification left the Nisbet family no choice.
Carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel emissions had turned seawater in Willapa Bay along Washington’s coast so lethal that slippery young Pacific oysters stopped growing. The same corrosive ocean water got sucked into an Oregon hatchery and routinely killed larvae the family bought as oyster seed.
So the Nisbets became the closest thing the world has seen to ocean-acidification refugees. They took out loans and spent $1 million and moved half their production 3,000 miles away.
“I was afraid for everything we’d built,” Goose Point Oyster Co. founder Dave Nisbet said of the hatchery, which opened last year. “We had to do something. We had to figure this thing out, or we’d be out of business.”
Oysters started dying by the billions along the Northwest coast in 2005, and have been struggling ever since. When scientists cautiously linked the deaths to plummeting ocean pH in 2008 and 2009, few outside the West Coast’s $110 million industry believed it.
Oysters from the Nisbets’ Hawaii hatchery are almost ready to be shipped to Willapa Bay and planted. When corrosive water off Washington rises to the surface, many oysters die before reaching this age.
Ed Jones, manager at the Taylor Shellfish Hatchery in Hood Canal’s Dabob Bay, pries open an oyster. Ocean acidification is believed to have killed billions of oysters in Northwest waters since 2005.
By the time scientists confirmed it early last year, the region’s several hundred oyster growers had become a global harbinger — the first tangible sign anywhere in the world that ocean acidification already was walloping marine life and hurting people.
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Worried oystermen testified before Congress. A few hit the road to speak at science conferences. Journalists visited the tidelands from Australia, Europe and Korea. Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire established a task force of ocean acidification experts, who sought ways to fight this global problem locally.
But the eight years of turmoil the Nisbet family endured trying to outrun their corroding tides offered them a unique perch from which to view debate over CO2 emissions.
And the world’s earliest victims of shifting ocean chemistry fear humanity still doesn’t get it.
“I don’t care if you think it’s the fault of humans or not,” Nisbet said. “If you want to keep your head in the sand, that’s up to you. But the rest of us need to get it together because we’re not out of the woods yet on this thing.”
A Goose Point Oyster Co. employee harvests fresh oysters at dawn on the Nisbet family’s tidelands in Willapa Bay. The Nisbets struggled to make ends meet in recent years as ocean acidification wiped out oyster reproduction in the bay and along the coast.
Shellfish ‘pretty much all we have’
To understand why the Nisbets landed in Hawaii, you first have to understand Willapa Bay.
At low tide on a crisp dawn, Dave Nisbet’s daughter, 27-year-old Kathleen Nisbet, bundled in fleece and Gore-Tex, steps from a skiff onto the glittering tide flats. Even at eight months pregnant, she is agile as a cat after decades of sloshing through mud in hip boots.
All around, employees scoop fresh shellfish from the surf and pile it in bins. Nisbet watches the harvest for a while, jokes with workers in Spanish, then clambers back into the boat.
“I’m always happy to get out here,” she whispers. “I never tire of it.”
The Nisbets were relative newcomers to shellfish.
Native Americans along the coast relied on shellfish for thousands of years. After settlers overfished local oysters, shipping them by schooner to San Francisco during the Gold Rush, farmers started raising bivalves here like crops. Now the industry in this shallow estuary and Puget Sound employs about 3,200 people and produces one-quarter of the nation’s oysters.
U.S. human sources of carbon dioxide
Source: U.S. EPA, Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times
Kathleen’s parents bought 10 acres of tidelands near Bay Center in 1975 and started growing their own, which Dave sold from the back of his truck. Sometimes Kathleen came along.
She sipped a baby bottle and ate cookies while riding the dredge with her father. She packed boxes and labeled jars with her mother, Maureene Nisbet, and piloted a skiff by herself at age 10 through lonely channels. She keeps a cluster of shells on her desk at the family processing plant to store business cards and office supplies.
“Willapa is about oyster and clam farming,” she said. “It’s pretty much all we have.”
Her parents built their business over decades, one market at a time. They eventually pieced together 500 acres of tidelands and hired 70 people.
For a long time, business was good — until, overnight, it suddenly wasn’t.
Dramatic crash
It’s hard to imagine now how far CO2 was from anyone’s mind when the oysters crashed.
A handful of healthy oyster seed from Goose Point Oyster Co.’s Hawaiian hatchery takes root on an adult oyster shell. When young oysters reach this age, they are strong enough to withstand the Northwest’s increasingly corrosive waters — at least for now.
In 2005, when no young oysters survived in Willapa Bay at all, farmers blamed the vagaries of nature. After two more years with essentially no reproduction, panic set in. Then things got worse.
By 2008, oysters were dying at Oregon’s Whiskey Creek Hatchery, which draws water directly from the Pacific Ocean. The next year, it struck a Taylor Shellfish hatchery outside Quilcene, which gets its water from Hood Canal. Owners initially suspected bacteria, Vibrio tubiashii. But shellfish died even when it wasn’t present.
Willapa farming is centered on the nonnative Pacific oyster, which was introduced from Japan in the 1920s. Some farms raise them in the wild, but that’s so complex most buy oyster seed from hatcheries to get things started.
The hatcheries spawn adult oysters, producing eggs and then larvae that grow tiny shells. When the creatures settle on a hard surface — usually an old oyster shell — these young mollusks get plopped into the bay and moved around for years until they fatten up.
Only a handful of hatcheries supply West Coast farmers, including Whiskey Creek and Taylor Shellfish, which sells seed only after meeting its own needs. So each spring, Kathleen’s parents put an order in with Whiskey Creek until the mid-2000s, when that option vanished.
“I do not think people understand the seriousness of the problem. Ocean acidification … has the potential to be a real catastrophe.”
“The hatchery had a long waiting list of customers and no seed, and we had a small window of time to get it into the bay,” Dave Nisbet recalled. “They had nothing.”
Whiskey Creek hatchery closed for weeks at a stretch. Production at Taylor Shellfish was off more than 60 percent. And more than just regular customers needed help.
With wild oysters not growing at all, suddenly hundreds of growers needed shellfish larvae. The entire industry was on the brink. Oyster growers from Olympia to Grays Harbor worried that in a few years’ time they would not be able to bring shellfish to market.
Nisbet made frantic calls, but could not find another source. He worked closely with Whiskey Creek, but owners there were stumped. Nisbet knew his business was in trouble.
“It’s like any other farm,” Dave Nisbet said. “If you don’t plant seed, sooner or later you don’t have crops. And there wasn’t enough seed to go around.”
In 2008, Kathleen Nisbet fretted about the prospect of laying off people her family had employed since she’d been in diapers. She feared that years of bad or no production could become the new normal.
Second-generation oyster farmer Kathleen Nisbet gets shuttled at sunrise from the Goose Point Oyster Co. processing plant in Bay Center, Pacific County, to the oyster flats of Willapa Bay. View photo gallery →
“It was really tough, as a second generation, to come in knowing the struggles we were going to have,” she said. “It’s really hard on a business when you’ve built something for the past 30 years and you have to take your business and basically cut it in half.”
But unless the family found a solution, they soon would have nothing to sell.
And no one, anywhere, could tell them what was wrong.
“I thought, ‘What are we going to do?’ ” Dave said.
Then the oyster growers met the oceanographers.
Corrosive waters rise to surface
Dick Feely, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had measured ocean chemistry for more than 30 years and by the early 2000s was noting a dramatic change off the West Coast.
Low pH water naturally occurred hundreds of feet down, where colder water held more CO2. But that corrosive water was rising swiftly, getting ever closer to the surface where most of the marine life humans care about lived.
So in 2007, Feely organized a crew of scientists. They measured and tracked that water from Canada to Mexico.
“What surprised us was we actually saw these very corrosive waters for the very first time get to the surface in Northern California,” he said.
That hadn’t been expected for 50 to 100 years. And that wasn’t the worst of it.
Because of the way the ocean circulates, the corrosive water that surfaces off Washington, California and Oregon is the result of CO2 that entered the sea decades earlier. Even if emissions get halted immediately, West Coast sea chemistry — unlike the oceans at large — would worsen for several decades before plateauing.
It would take 30 to 50 years before the worst of it reached the surface. Oregon State University scientist Burke Hales once compared that phenomenon to the Unabomber mailing a package to the future. The dynamite had a delayed fuse.
Feely published his findings in 2008. Shellfish growers took note. Some recalled earlier studies that predicted juvenile oysters would someday prove particularly sensitive to acidification. The oyster farmers invited Feely to their annual conference.
Feely explained that when north winds blew, deep ocean water was drawn right to the beach, which meant this newly corrosive water probably got sucked into the hatchery. That same water also flowed into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and made its way to Hood Canal.
The oyster industry pleaded with Congress, which supplied money for new equipment. Over several years, the hatcheries tested their water using high-tech pH sensors. When the pH was low, it was very low and baby oysters died within two days. By drawing water only when the pH was normal, shellfish production got back on track.
“They told us it was like turning on headlights on a car — it was so clear what was going on,” Feely said.
It wasn’t until 2012 that Feely and a team from Oregon State University finally showed with certainty that acidification had caused the problem. Early this summer OSU professor George Waldbusser demonstrated precisely how.
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Reporter Craig Welch, along with NOAA oceanographers Jeremy Mathis and Richard Feely, answer reader questions.
The oysters were not dissolving. They were dying because the corrosive water forced the young animals to use too much energy. Acidification had robbed the water of important minerals, so the oysters worked far harder to extract what they needed to build their shells.
Waldbusser still is not entirely sure why acidification has not yet hit other oyster species. It could be because other species, such as the native Olympic, have evolved to be more adaptable to high CO2, or because they rear larvae differently, or because they spawn at a time of year when corrosive water is less common. It could also be that acidification is just not quite bad enough yet to do them harm.
Either way, by then, the Nisbets had moved on. They had experimented with growing oysters in Hawaii and now had their own hatchery outside Hilo.
Manager David Stick outside Hawaiian Shellfish, the hatchery started near Hilo by Goose Point Oyster Co. It draws water from an underground saltwater aquifer rather than directly from the ocean.
Small fixes, big worries
David Stick opened a spigot from a tub that resembled an aboveground pool. He let water wash over a fine mesh screen. It was a muggy Hawaii morning and the Nisbets’ hatchery manager was straining oyster larvae.
When the tiny bivalves are big enough to produce shells, Stick mails them back to Washington. There, Kathleen’s crew plants them in the bay.
Instead of relying on the increasingly corrosive Northwest coast, the family built a hatchery that drew on something else — a warm, underground, saltwater aquifer. That water source is not likely to be affected by ocean chemistry changes for many decades, if at all.
But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing more to fear.
For now, no one else has taken as dramatic a step as the Nisbets. The Northwest industry is getting around the problem. Hatcheries have changed the timing of when they draw in water. Scientists installed ocean monitors that give hatchery owners a few days notice that conditions will be poor for rearing larvae.
Growers are crushing up shells and adding chemicals to the water to make it less corrosive. Shellfish geneticists are working to breed new strains of oysters that are more resistant to low pH water.
But no one thinks any of that will work forever.
Hatchery worker Brian Koval transfers algae from a beaker to a larger vessel in the Nisbets’ oyster hatchery in Hawaii. View photo gallery →
“I do not think people understand the seriousness of the problem,” Stick said. “Ocean acidification is going to be a game-changer. It has the potential to be a real catastrophe.”
At the moment, the problem only strikes oysters at the very early stages of their development, within the first week or so of life. Once they have built shell and are placed back on the tide flats, they tend to deal better with sea chemistry changes.
But how long will that be the case? How would they respond to changes in the food web?
“The algae is changing,” Stick said. “The food source that everything depends on is changing. Will things adapt? We don’t know. We’ve never had to face anything like this before.”
An urgency to educate
With one young son, and a baby on the way, it’s been impossible for Kathleen not to think about her own next generation.
“Thank God my dad took a proactive measure to protect me,” she said. “If he wouldn’t have done that, I would suffer and my son would suffer.”
She thinks a lot about the need for school curricula and other efforts to get kids and adults thinking and learning about changing sea chemistry.
“I don’t think that our government is recognizing that ocean acidification exists,” she said. “I don’t think society understands the impacts it has. They think ocean acidification … no big deal, it’s a huge ocean.”
But the reality is, over the next decade, the world will have to make progress tackling this issue.
“We’re living proof,” Nisbet said. “If you ignore it, it’s only going to get worse. Plain and simple: It will get worse.”
Wildlife Conservation Society The map illustrates the global distribution of the climate stability/ecoregional intactness relationship. Ecoregions with both high climate stability and vegetation intactness are dark grey. Ecoregions with high climate stability but low levels of vegetation intactness are dark orange. Ecoregions with low climate stability but high vegetation intactness are dark green. Ecoregions that have both low climate stability and low levels of vegetation intactness are pale cream.
Southern and southeastern Asia, western and central Europe, eastern South America and southern Australia are among the regions most vulnerable to climate change on Earth, a new map compiled by the Wildlife Conservation Society shows. But Turtle Island and much of Indian country are not far behind.
This map, unlike previous assessments, factors in the condition of the areas surveyed rather than simply looking at climate change’s effects on landscapes and seascapes. The human activity that has shaped many of these regions already must be factored in, the map’s creators said in a statement, because that helps determine how susceptible the areas will be to the influences of the world’s changing climate.
“We need to realize that climate change is going to impact ecosystems both directly and indirectly in a variety of ways and we can’t keep on assuming that all adaptation actions are suitable everywhere,” said James Watson, who led the study as director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Climate Change Program, in a statement from the WCS on September 17.
“A vulnerability map produced in the study examines the relationship of two metrics: how intact an ecosystem is, and how stable the ecosystem is going to be under predictions of future climate change,” the society said in its statement. “The analysis creates a rating system with four general categories for the world’s terrestrial regions, with management recommendations determined by the combination of factors.”
The dark green areas of the map, which are much of northern Canada, delineate areas of low climate stability but a high rate of intact vegetation, the society said. Wildlife Conservation Society scientists were joined in the map’s creation by researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia and Stanford University in California. The research was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
One of the goals of compiling the map was to determine the best places to invest conservation resources, the society said. The areas with the most stable climate have the best chance of preserving species if efforts are amped up there, the society said.
“The fact is there is only limited funds out there and we need to start to be clever in our investments in adaptation strategies around the world,” Watson said. “The analysis and map in this study is a means of bringing clarity to complicated decisions on where limited resources will do the most good.”
WINTER HAVEN, FLORIDA – The Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc., through its growing citrus production business, Seminole Pride, has acquired a majority interest in Noble Food Service, the sales and marketing division of Noble Juice of Winter Haven, Florida.
“Our combined entity offers everything from premium orange juice, which is the standard bearer of citrus juices, to a full array of specialty citrus juices, the fastest-growing segment of the business.”
Said Tony Sanchez, president of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc, the Tribe’s business development arm.
“By joining forces in a sales and marketing operation, Seminole Pride and Noble Juice will create one of the industry’s most extensive line of citrus juices and expand their distribution to more restaurants, schools, hotels, hospitals and catering operators throughout the United States,”
Sanchez said.
Seminole Pride products will now be sold through a broad national network of juice retailers, while Noble Juice will benefit from the minority supplier status of Seminole Pride. The two entities will share profits from future growth.
Citrus juices sold through Noble Food Service include:
Orange
Red grapefruit
Blood orange
Pummelo Paradise
Tangerine
Tangerine guava mango
Tangerine clementine
Organic orange
Organic orange tangerine
Organic grapefruit
Lemon
Lime
Noble Food Service also markets organic apple juice, lemonade, organic lemonade and bottled spring water.
“The Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Roe family share a strong commitment to the sustainability of Florida’s bounty,”
said Quentin Roe, chief executive officer of the Noble companies, including Noble Food Service.
“In addition to responsible growing practices, we both feature eco-friendly containers, including the juice industry’s only 100 percent plant-based bottle and label.”
The Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc., the business development arm of the Seminole Tribe, is working to diversify its product offerings under the Seminole Pride brand, which currently supplies spring water and beef, in addition to juice. Seminole Pride uses only those oranges that are picked at the peak of maturity to ensure a sweet and delicious juice.
Fruit for Seminole Pride is grown on the Brighton Seminole Reservation and at approved groves throughout Florida. The Seminole Pride business is one example of the Seminole Tribe’s mission to better the lives and livelihoods of all the American Indian peoples.
A Native American Shaman’s Guide to Physical Wholeness
Author: Wolf Moondance
Illustrator: Jim Sharpe
Book Description:
Through a combination of traditional healing rituals and cutting-edge psychology, Native American shaman Wolf Moondance reveals the secrets of uniting the physical and spiritual selves–and changing your life. “The author is very adept at melding sound psychological techniques with ancient wisdom, thus providing unique insights in a readable form. A truly different way of examining consciousness and spirit–providing an impetus to change.”–Fate.
PINE RIDGE, S.D., September 3, 2013—The Oglala Sioux Tribal Council passed a resolution announcing its formal support of Teach For America-South Dakota corps members and alumni in their efforts to advance Native student achievement in the state.
Teach For America recruits, trains, and develops recent graduates and professionals to teach in urban and rural public schools, including some that are tribally operated under grant or contract with the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) and some that are BIE-operated. During the 2012-13 school year, 510 Teach For America corps members taught in Nativecommunities in South Dakota, Hawaii, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
The Oglala Sioux Tribal Council resolution states in part:
Oglala Sioux Tribal Council supports Teach For America corps members and alumni in their efforts to build a truly effective movement through building local partnerships with students, families, local educators and with other organizations to eliminate educational inequity thus bridging the opportunity gap.
The resolution cites rigorous research studies that demonstrate Teach For America corps members have a positive impact on student achievement. Additionally, it recognizes the organization’s effort to strengthen its culturally responsive teaching training to better fit the needs of Native students.
The resolution also encourages other tribal governments and school districts serving American Indian students to strengthen their partnership with Teach For America.
“We are proud to support Teach For America as an ally in the critical effort to help Native students realize their full potential through excellent educational opportunities,” said council representative Kevin Yellow Bird-Steel. “The students in Pine Ridge classrooms right now will be the future tribal, state, and national leaders.”
Teach For America−South Dakota has been partnering with schools on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations since 2004. This year, more than 40 new Teach For America teachers will be teaching in reservation schools on Pine Ridge, Rosebud and for the first time Standing Rock and Lower Brule.
“We want the work of our corps members to be directly aligned with the visions and goals of the tribes, communities and families with whom we partner,” said Jim Curran, Teach For America− South Dakota executive director. “It means a lot to have formal support from the Oglala Nation.”
In 2010, Teach For America launched its Native Alliance Initiative to provide an additional source of effective teachers in Native communities and advance student achievement in Native schools.
“Education in Native schools is about the community. Teach For America is incredibly grateful for this support from the Oglala Sioux Tribal Government,” said Robert Cook, managing director of the Native Alliance Initiative and enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. “This partnership will allow our corps members and alumni to have a more meaningful impact with students. It is a symbol of the alliance needed to help all students reach their full potential.”
About Oglala Sioux Tribe
The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is an Oglala Sioux Native American reservation located in South Dakota. Originally included within the territory of the Great Sioux Reservation, Pine Ridge was established in 1889 in the southwest corner of South Dakota on the Nebraska border. Today it consists of 3,468.86 sq mi (8,984.306 km2) of land area and is the eighth-largest reservation in the United States, larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined.
About Teach For America
Teach For America works in partnership with communities to expand educational opportunity for children facing the challenges of poverty. Founded in 1990, Teach For America recruits and develops a diverse corps of outstanding individuals of all academic disciplines to commit two years to teach in high-need schools and become lifelong leaders in the movement to end educational inequity. This fall, 11,000 corps members will teach in 48 urban and rural regions across the country, while 32,000 alumni will work across sectors to ensure that all children have access to an excellent education. For more information, visit www.teachforamerica.org and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
During a visit from White House officials, Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to President Obama, and Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls, commended Tulalip for all of it’s efforts, both in criminal justice in general and specifically for playing such an impactful role bringing awareness to the plight of Native American women left out by original VAWA. Photo/Brandi N. Montreuil
By Niki Cleary, Tulalip News
TULALIP, Wash., — “It’s not enough to cry peace, we have to act peace and we have to live peace,” Tulalip Tribal Court’s Chief Judge Theresa Pouley opened a September visit from White House officials with her teachings as a citizen of the Colville Confederated Tribes and as a tribal court judge.
She went on to explain that although talking and planning are necessary to ensure justice, walking the talk is crucial.
“Law and justice is made up of every arm of the tribe,” said Pouley. “Everyone meets once a month and we all pitch in to see what we can do to make the justice system better. A separation of powers doesn’t mean a separation of problems and certainly doesn’t mean a separation of solutions. One of the great things that Tulalip does is collaborate, out of the box, to provide services. That’s the core of the way justice gets done in Indian Country.”
That collaboration, she clarified, along with a history of providing due process beyond the requirements of the law, are just two of the reasons that Tulalip is ready to take over jurisdiction of all cases involving domestic violence. Until now, tribes have had no jurisdiction over domestic violence when one of the parties involved is not a tribal citizen.
“This is a historic moment,” said Pouley. “I want to marvel in the fact that for the first time, tribal courts are given authority over non-tribal [citizens]. We recognize that tribes are in the best position to do it [enforce the Violence Against Women Act], and we can do it better. We’re waiting to be a pilot. We’re ready to go and we can change the face of this community!”
The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was originally passed 19 years ago. The re-authorization of the act was delayed by a fight to include provisions protecting Native American women.
President Obama encapsulated the necessity for those provisions during a speech he made while signing the re-authorization.
“Indian Country has some of the highest rates of domestic abuse in America. And one of the reasons is that when Native American women are abused on tribal lands by an attacker who is not Native American, the attacker is immune from prosecution by tribal courts. Well, as soon as I sign this bill that ends.”
Tulalip’s Interim Chief of Police Carlos Echevarria reiterated the importance of tribes having jurisdiction over all domestic violence cases.
“We see up to 75,000 visitors daily,” he pointed out. “We have 13,000 non-member residents, a lot of traffic and a lot of guests. I can’t tell you how frustrating it’s been arresting non-Indians for domestic crimes against members and knowing that nothing was likely to be done.”
Tulalip Vice-Chairwoman Deborah Parker, who has become known nationally as the face of Native women affected by VAWA, put it in even plainer words.
“We shouldn’t have to walk in fear that we’re going to be raped or abused at any age, from infants to our elders. We get these calls daily. Pretty soon, with your help, this will change.”
Although pleased with this expansion of tribal jurisdiction, Echevarria said it can’t be the last step in recognizing tribes rights to police their lands.
“This is a significant achievement to all tribes and another step in creating a safer community,” he said. “We’ll now move on to the next step, full criminal jurisdiction and a reversal of the Oliphant decision.”
Although no decisions or formal announcements came from the day-long tour, Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to President Obama, and Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls commended Tulalip for all of it’s efforts, both in criminal justice in general and specifically for playing such an impactful role bringing awareness to the plight of Native American women left out by original VAWA. She made a point of thanking Vice-Chairwoman Parker for being willing to relive her painful past, ‘not just one time, but over and over and over again,’ in order to ensure that Native women are protected in the future.
“It’s an exciting time to be here,” said Jarrett. “As we heard from Chief Justice Pouley, you are ready. Now it’s up to our team to step up to the plate.”
On Thursday, the House will vote on a bill that would direct the Secretary of Agriculture to convey more than 2,400 acres of U.S. Forest Service land in southeast Arizona to the Resolution Cooper Mining Co. Enactment of the bill would allow Resolution Cooper, dually owed by Rio Tinto Mining and BHP Billiton, to operate a large-scale cooper mine on Oak Flat disrupting sacred tribal grounds.
If passed, this bill referred to as the Southeast Arizona Land Exchange Act, could potentially destroy sacred tribal places of worship by allowing the foreign mining giants to extract one cubic mile of ore from beneath the surface of the earth. The mining companies would extract the ore through an ecologically destructive process called block cave mining.
In 2011, ICTMN reported that Resolution Copper would use controversial block-cave method, in which explosives are set off below the ore body, creating a space underneath and allowing the ore to collapse from its own weight, after which it’s extracted. Opponents fear the method could damage Native American sacred lands, among them the historical Apache Leap, where tribal warriors leaped to their deaths rather than surrender to Arizona soldiers, according to historical accounts like this one.
In a press release, Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) urged colleagues to vote “no” on the bill and said that Oak Flat has been a place where Native Americans have prayed, gathered medical herbs and plants, healed in holy perennial springs, and performed religious ceremonies for decades.
“The protection of places of worship is a fight for which we should all be united,” Moore wrote in a press release to her colleagues. “We must stand together to protect places of worship, including tribal sacred sites because these sites are part of the rich heritage and culture of our country and the essence of our moral identies.” She said the bills passage would jeopardize the cultural history of other sacred sites by setting a precedent with regard to federal protection of tribal sites.
The bill was introduced by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) in February. Last month, Gosar invited the public to a town hall meeting to gage support of his efforts to bring thousands of jobs to Arizona’s Copper Corridor. He said this goal could be achieved if 678 is passed. “Getting this critical jobs bill across the finish line requires Arizonans to rise up and let their voices be heard. Nearly 4,000 jobs and billions of dollars in economic activity are at stake.”
The withdrawal of Resolution Cooper’s controversial block cave mining process is supported by the San Carlos Apache Tribes, local tribes, and some environmentalists.
Arizona Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ)
The project has also been opposed by Arizona Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ) whowrote about his oppositionto the bill saying that he was not opposed to mining, in principle, but said that they should not come at the expense of Native American rights.
ICTMN also reported that the bill would give around 2,400 acres of public land in southeastern Arizona to Resolution Cooper Co. in exchange for around 5,000 acres in several parcels around the state. As it stands, the bill has largely remained the same.
The federal government has acknowledged its obligation to protect sacred tribal grounds, but if the land swap bill passes, Moore said, Oak Bluff would be transferred to Resolution Copper for private ownership, and out of the domain of regulation by federal law.
“People who think money is first over water and land, such as some people in Washington, are destroying the earth and that’s where our argument is,” San Carlos Apache Tribe Chairman Wendsler Nosie, told ICTMN in 2010. “That’s wrong. You cannot do that, and that’s why I’m standing up for this.”
Shredding fall leaves with a mower and spreading a layer over the soil in the garden will conserve moisture and insulate the roots of perennial plants. Photo/Melinda Myers, LLC
By gardening expert Melinda Myers
Don’t let a busy schedule stop you from creating a beautiful landscape. Incorporate a few of these changes in your fall landscape care. You’ll create beautiful results with a limited investment of time and effort.
Cut the grass, recycle fall leaves, and improve the soil with a pass of the lawn mower. Shred leaves and leave them on the lawn as you mow this fall. As long as you can see the grass through the leaf pieces, the lawn will be fine. As the leaves break down they add organic matter to the soil, improving drainage in clay soil and water holding ability in sandy soils.
Or, as an alternative, use excess leaves as a soil mulch. Shred the leaves with your mower and spread a layer over the soil to conserve moisture and insulate the roots of perennials. Fall mulching gives you a jump on next spring’s landscape chores.
Improve your lawn’s health by fertilizing this fall with a low nitrogen slow release fertilizer, like Milorganite. You’ll reduce the risk of disease problems and with slower weed growth in fall, your lawn, not the weeds, will benefit from the nutrients. Fall fertilization also helps lawns recover from the stresses of summer by encouraging deep roots and denser growth that can better compete with weeds and tolerate disease and insects.
Northern gardeners can follow the holiday schedule and fertilize Labor Day and Halloween. Southern gardeners should make their last fall fertilization at least 30 days before the lawn goes dormant or the average first killing frost to avoid winter kill.
Do a bit of planting. Cool season annuals brighten up the fall garden and, for those in warmer regions, the winter garden. Consider adding cold hardy pansies. They provide color in the fall garden, survive most winters, and are back blooming in the spring just as the snow melts.
Fall is also a good time to plant perennials, trees and shrubs. The soil is warm and the air cooler, so the plants are less stressed and establish more quickly. Select plants suited to the growing conditions and be sure to give them plenty of room to reach their mature size.
Plant daffodils, tulips, hyacinths and other bulbs in fall for extra color next spring. Set the bulbs at a depth of two to three times their height deep. Then cover them with soil and sprinkle on a low nitrogen slow release fertilizer. This type of fertilizer promotes rooting without stimulating fall growth subject to winter kill.
Base your bulb planting time on the weather not the calendar. Start planting after the night-time temperatures hover between 40 and 50 degrees. Be patient, waiting until the soil cools reduces the risk of early sprouting that often occurs during a warm fall.
Those gardening in the far south and along the gulf coast can purchase pre-cooled bulbs to compensate for the warm winters. Or the chilling can be done at home by storing the bulbs in a 35 to 45 degree location for at least 14 weeks before planting.
Leave healthy perennials stand for winter. This increases hardiness and adds beauty to the winter landscape with their seed heads, dried foliage and the birds they attract. Plus, it will delay cleanup until spring when gardeners are anxious to get outdoors and start gardening.
However, be sure to remove any diseased or insect-infested plants to reduce the source of pest problems in next year’s garden.
Start composting or add shredded leaves and other plant debris to an existing compost pile. Combine fall leaves with other plant waste, a bit of soil or compost, and sprinkle with fertilizer to create compost. Recycling yard waste saves time bagging, hauling and disposing of green debris. You also reduce or eliminate the need to buy soil amendments to improve your existing garden soil.
Incorporate one or all six of these practices to increase the health and beauty of your landscape now and for years to come.
Gardening expert, TV/radio host, author & columnist Melinda Myers has more than 30 years of horticulture experience and has written over 20 gardening books, including Can’t Miss Small Space Gardening. She hosts the nationally syndicated Melinda’s Garden Moment segments and is a columnist and contributing editor for Birds & Blooms magazine. Myers’ web site, www.melindamyers.com, offers gardening videos and tips.
Source: U.S. EPA, Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times
