Washington, DC – Native children form the backbone of future tribal success and someday will lead the charge to create thriving, vibrant communities which is why four national Native organizations – the National Congress of American Indians, the National Indian Child Welfare Association, the National Indian Education Association, and the National Indian Health Board – have come together to update the joint policy agenda for Native youth. The goal of this policy agenda is to set forth specific recommendations to improve the social, emotional, mental, physical, and economic health of children and youth, allowing them to achieve their learning and developmental potential. In short, this initiative calls on key stakeholders to put First Kids 1st.
This agenda is intended as a tool to assist tribal leaders and other policymakers in their work to create and implement a vision for a vibrant, healthy community. It is also intended to guide stakeholders as they prioritize legislation and policy issues that may affect Native children and youth. The partners have identified four overarching themes as guiding principles for improving children’s lives and outcomes. Within each theme, the agenda sets forth tribal strategies and policy objectives to implement these principles.
Native Children’s Policy Agenda: Putting First Kids 1st is the updated work of the 2008 National Children’s Agenda, created by the same four organizations, and generously supported by W.K. Kellogg Foundation. This joint work for Native youth is part of the “First Kids 1st” initiative, which was announced last year and focuses on changing federal, state, and tribal policy to create conditions in which American Indian and Alaska Native children can thrive.
About The National Congress of American Indians Founded in 1944, the National Congress of American Indians advocates on behalf of tribal governments and communities, promoting strong tribal-federal government-to-government policies, and promoting a better understanding among the general public regarding American Indian and Alaska Native governments, people and rights. For more information visit www.ncai.org
About The National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA) NICWA works to support the safety, health, and spiritual strength of Native children along the broad continuum of their lives. The organization promotes building tribal capacity to prevent child abuse and neglect through positive systems change at the state, federal, and tribal level. For more information visit www.nicwa.org
About The National Indian Education Association (NIEA) NIEA is the Nation’s most inclusive advocacy organization working to advance comprehensive education opportunities for American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians. Formed by Native educators in 1969 to encourage a national discourse on education, NIEA adheres to the organization’s founding principles- to bring educators together to explore ways to improve schools and the educational systems serving Native children; to promote the maintenance and continued development of language and cultural programs; and to develop and implement strategies for influencing local, state, and federal policy and decision makers. Through advocacy, capacity building, and education, NIEA helps Native students, and their communities, succeed. For more information visit www.niea.org
About The National Indian Health Board The National Indian Health Board advocates on behalf of all Tribal Governments and American Indians/Alaska Natives in their efforts to provide quality health care. Visit www.nihb.org for more information.
RED Talks is a Seattle Native community gathering where invited speakers from the community stand and speak about a topic or subject relevant to the group. The event starts with a potluck and a time to talk with and get to know one another.
After a summer break we are holding another RED Talks community event on Wednesday October 7th at Daybreak Star Arts Center in Discovery Park from 6-9 p.m.
This RED Talks topics will be “Working With Native American Youth in the 21st Century” and the speaker will be Sarah Sense-Wilson.
Sarah is Oglala Sioux and a long-time activist and advocate and leader in the Seattle Native community. She works in the fields of chemical dependency and problem gambling and is currently working for the Tulalip Tribe’s Behavior Wellness Problem Gambling Program. She is a state certified counselor in these areas. She is also a co-founder and elected chair of the Urban Native Education Alliance and has helped design and create and implement educational, cultural, and sports activities for our Seattle urban Native youth.
The second topic “Native Women in Technology” will be discussed as a panel three Native women who work in the high technology fields. Native people are highly underrepresented in the technology fields and Native women only more so. These women will share their experiences and thoughts around this disproportionality.
Sarah Kelly is White Earth Nation Pillager Band of Ojibwe. She is a founding member of the Urban Native education alliance and also has served as the president of the Title VII Parent Advisory board for the Seattle School District.
She has a B.A. in Business Administration and has worked in the software industry for over 15 years for such companies as Boeing, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile, the Port of Seattle, and Microsoft. At Microsoft she worked for Xbox, MSN, and other teams.
Ruth Sims is Navajo/Oglala Sioux. She has a double B.S. in engineering and Mathematics; a Masters Degree in Controls and Robotics and her Ph.D. work is in Utility Scale Power Systems. She currently works for Boeing on solar cell efficiency for space applications. She hopes to work for tribally-owned and operated utility companies specializing in renewable energy.
Joey Gray is Metis/Okanagan and is the Executive Director of United Indians of All Tribes Foundation. She has a Masters Degree in Library Information Science. She has also worked to transform the international flying disc sport so that boys and girls can play as equally valued teammates in local school and international competition. She describes herself as “a nerd, a librarian, an athlete, and an activist.”
TULALIP, Wash. — A team of detectives is investigating after a 50-year-old man died during a physical altercation with police on the Tulalip Reservation Friday night.
Two Tulalip Tribal Police Department officers and one Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office deputy were responding to reports of a man walking in the roadway in the 6400 block of Marine View Drive around 9:45 p.m.
When officers arrived they detained the man, and placed him in protective custody in order to remove him from the road, the Mukilteo Police Department said.
The man began fighting with officers while they tried to place him in the patrol car, and became unresponsive during the altercation, police said.
Officers attempted to revive him with CPR until medical aid arrived, but he died at the scene, according to police.
“We are looking into all aspects,” Colt Davis with Mukilteo Police Department said. “The medical examiner needs to look at the autopsy and see what’s going on with the body. We don’t know exactly what caused what, because we just know during the alteration the body became unresponsive. The officers noticed that and gave CPR to revive the subject, and he unfortunately died at the scene.”
The official cause and manner of death will be confirmed by the Medical Examiner’s Office.
The man’s name has not been released, but community members say he was a husband, father, and comes from a prominent tribal family.
The 27-year-old deputy with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office has three years of service, the 24-year-old officer with Tulalip Tribal police has 14 months of service, and the 39-year-old officer with Tulalip Tribal police has nine years of service, officials said.
The deputy and the tribal police officers have been placed on administrative leave pending the investigation.
Thunderbird and Whale had a terrible fight. Illustration by Jeffrey Veregge
Mega-quakes have periodically rocked North America’s Pacific Northwest. Indigenous people told terrifying stories about the devastation but refused to leave.
In the year 1700, on January 26, at 9:00 at night, in what is now northern California, Earthquake was running up and down the coast. His feet were heavy and when he ran he shook the ground so much it sank down and the ocean poured in. “The earth would quake and quake again and quake again,” said the Yurok people. “And the water was flowing all over.” The people went to the top of a hill, wearing headbands of woodpecker feathers, so they could dance a jumping dance that would keep the earthquake away and return them to their normal lives. But then they looked down and saw the water covering their village and the whole coast; they knew they could never make the world right again.
That same night, farther up the coast in what is now Washington, Thunderbird and Whale had a terrible fight, making the mountains shake and uprooting the trees, said the Quileute and the Hoh people; they said the ocean rose up and covered the whole land. Farther north still, on Vancouver Island, dwarfs who lived in a mountain invited a person to dance around their drum; the person accidentally kicked the drum and got earthquake-foot, said the Nuu-chah-nulth people, and after that every step he took caused an earthquake. The land shook and the ocean flooded in, said the Huu-ay-aht people who are part of the Nuu-chah-nulth, and people didn’t even have time to wake up and get into their canoes, and “everything then drifted away, everything was lost and gone.”
Here’s what geologists say: the earthquake that almost certainly occurred on the night of January 26, 1700, ruptured North America’s Pacific Northwest coast for hundreds of kilometers, from northern California, through Oregon and Washington, to southern Vancouver Island. Along this coast, the Juan de Fuca plate was pushing under the larger North American plate, had gotten stuck—locked—but kept pushing until it released, abruptly and violently. The earthquake that resulted was probably a magnitude 9, about as big as earthquakes get. The coast dropped by as much as two meters, and a tsunami brought floods more than 300 meters inland.
Geologists now know that the Pacific Northwest has been having these earthquakes and tsunamis irregularly every 500 years or so; their oldest record in sediments goes back at least 10,000 years. The evidence is massive: subsided marshes, drowned forests, sediment layers showing enormous landslides that flowed out on the ocean floor, seismic profiles of the Juan de Fuca plate, and satellite measurements of a coast deforming from the stress of a plate that’s once again locked. In the next 50 years, the chance of another magnitude 9 earthquake there is 1 in 10.
On Vancouver Island, the Nuu-chah-nulth people told tales of mountain dwarves inviting a person to dance around their drum. When the person accidentally kicked the drum—depicted in the illustration above by Nuu-chah-nulth artist Tim Paul—he got earthquake foot and his steps set off vast tremors. Image courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives
In the cities of the Pacific Northwest, the impact will be terrible. Many buildings were built before architects knew the area had earthquakes; later buildings were built with short, sharp California earthquakes in mind, not the Northwest’s longer, larger ones. “The ground’s going to shake for three minutes,” says Thomas Heaton, geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology and one of the first to propose the area’s earthquake potential. “And [in simulations] it’s easy to come up with ground motion that would collapse tall buildings.” Then comes the tsunami, and “with magnitude 9 earthquakes,” says Heaton, “you always get tsunamis.” Governments of course know this: seismic networks and a tsunami warning system are in place; governments and institutions in the Pacific Northwest have emergency plans, are educating the public in how to respond, and have published evacuation maps; buildings and bridges that fail to meet the modern earthquake building codes are being retrofitted.
But all this—the governments’ plans for the next earthquake and geologists’ understanding of the ancient ones—happened only in the last few decades. For the same 10,000-plus years that the Pacific Northwest has been having the earthquakes, indigenous groups have been living there. They have known forever that what the ground did was sudden and violent, that it came accompanied with catastrophic floods, and that it made people die. The questions for us, living in the present, are obvious. What was it like? And what was the impact of millennia of repeated catastrophes on the indigenous groups of the region? The answers seem obvious too, but they aren’t; this turns out to be a story about stories—how they merge into histories, how fragile they are, and how urgent.
What the indigenous people knew all along, geologists have known only since 1984. Thomas Heaton was still in college in 1970 when geologists, who knew that the world’s largest earthquakes occurred where one tectonic plate descended under another one, first recognized that one of these subduction zones ran between the Juan de Fuca and North American plates. But the so-called Cascadia Subduction Zone had no record of ever producing large earthquakes. So, says Heaton, “they thought it was aseismic, just creeping.”
Then in the early 1980s, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was considering whether to locate nuclear power plants in Washington and Oregon, and, just to be sure, asked the US Geological Survey (USGS) whether the Cascadia Subduction Zone was safe from earthquakes. Heaton, then at the USGS, knew about subduction zones because he’d consulted for Exxon on oil platforms in earthquake-prone Alaska. He compared the Cascadia zone with known earthquake areas and told the NRC, “Well, maybe it is aseismic, but another interpretation is, it looks like Chile—which is also aseismic, except for the big ones.” Perhaps, Heaton suggested, the Cascadia zone had escaped earthquakes only because it was currently locked.
Heaton published his surmise in 1984, and within a few years, Brian Atwater, also at the USGS, and other geologists found evidence of moving ground and great floods. But building geological evidence into a credible theory can take decades, and in the meantime, a colleague of Atwater’s and Heaton’s named Parke Snavely had been reading stories from the Makah people in Washington that described what sounded like floods. One Makah story in particular resembled the 1700 tsunami. “A long time ago but not at a very remote period,” the story began, the ocean receded quickly, then rose again until it submerged Cape Flattery; canoes were stranded in trees and many people died.
Snavely told Heaton about the stories, and the two of them did something un-geoscientific: they decided to take the Makah story not as myth, but as history. That is, they assumed the Makah were describing a geologically-recent tsunami, compared the Makah narrative with their understanding of Cape Flattery’s geology, found the similarity between story and geology “noteworthy,” and published their findings in the scientific literature. After that, other scientists also went looking in the stories for history. A team of anthropologists, geologists, and indigenous scholars led by geologist Ruth Ludwin of the University of Washington took 40 stories collected from native groups along the entire Cascadia Subduction Zone. They compared the narratives to what was known of the 1700 earthquake and tsunami, and found in effect, that the whole coast had been telling stories about it.
Alan McMillan and Ian Hutchinson—archaeologist and geographer, respectively, from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia—found other stories, most of them undateable, that were probably about other, even earlier earthquakes. The two scientists systematically plotted these coastal stories on a map of the archaeological and geological evidence of all Cascadian earthquakes and tsunamis. Along the coast—from the Yurok and Tolowa in northern California, the Tillamook in Oregon, the Quileute in Washington, to the Nuu-chah-nulth on Vancouver Island—were stories of Earthquake, Thunderbird, and Whale, or the mountain dwarfs and their earthquake drum. The Cowichan people on Vancouver Island, the Squamish in southern British Columbia, and the Makah in Washington each had stories about the earth shaking so violently that no one could stand, or the houses falling apart, or rockslides coming out of the mountains and burying villages. The Nuu-chah-nulth, like the Makah, told stories of the ocean receding suddenly, then flooding back powerfully and killing many, many people.
From the Tolowa people in northern California: one autumn, the earth shook and the water began rising. People began running and when the water reached them, they turned into snakes. But a girl and a boy from the village, both adolescents, outran the water by running to the top of a mountain where they built a fire to keep themselves warm. After 10 days, they went back down and the houses they lived in were gone, all that was left was sand, and all the people and animals were lying on the ground dead. The boy found food for the girl and then set out to look for people and a place to live. But the only people he found were dead ones. The boy came back and said he could find no one else for either of them to marry, so they’d better marry each other. They built a house and after a time, had babies. And many years and many generations later, there were many people who were “scattered everywhere and in every place there was a man living with his wife.”
Many scientific papers say that the indigenous stories are reasonable records, covering an unknowable amount of time, of earthquakes and tsunamis along the entire Cascadia Subduction Zone. They also add that so much destruction repeated for so long must have had a terrific impact on the indigenous groups’ worlds—that given their history, the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest would have taken catastrophe to heart. You might expect that they’d arranged their culture and lives around disaster. And further, you might hope that the impact on them would have some message, some advice, for us in the 21st century, waiting for our own disaster. But here’s where this storyline goes cold. Any such impact ought to show up in archaeological and anthropological evidence and it just doesn’t.
The people must have lost their houses and villages and livelihoods, they must have been ruined; but afterward they went back to living in the ruined places. McMillan went looking in the archaeological record for evidence of habitation and abandonment over the past 3,000 years in 30 excavated villages along the Washington and Vancouver Island coasts. “The seismic events were catastrophic but short term,” McMillan says. “The evidence is all that the sites were reoccupied afterward.”
Illustration by Mark Garrison
Nor did the people ultimately change the ways they lived. Robert Losey, an anthropologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, looked for evidence that after the 1700 earthquake the Tillamook people of Oregon changed what they hunted, what they ate, how their houses were built, and where they lived. “In the short term, the earthquake must have been horribly traumatic,” Losey says. But in the long term, “I don’t think it made a difference.”
Anthropologists and archaeologists seem to agree that not only was it normal to return to the life you already know how to live, but, as Losey says, it was also reasonable. The catastrophes came generations apart. The food that was gathered and hunted apparently rebounded quickly. And the architecture designed for seasonal mobility was generally single-story, made of flexible wood tied with cord, and might as well have been built to modern earthquake codes. “The First Nations did an entirely human thing,” Losey says. “They went right back and settled in harm’s way.” The Pacific Northwest turns out to be, in the long run, a place conducive to resilience.
So the clearest evidence of the impact of earthquakes and tsunamis on the coast’s indigenous people has to be in the stories. Maybe the stories explain how to be resilient, how to outsmart disaster. Maybe they warn the children to warn their own children. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake that killed 200,000 people in the Indonesian province of Aceh, killed only seven of the 78,000 people living on the island of Simeulue because the Simeulueans had been telling stories for generations of what to do during tsunamis. That may well have been the case in the Pacific Northwest, but the fact is, nobody knows for sure.
The reason is, the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest didn’t write down their earthquake stories; the stories were told only face to face. And apparently they’re not told much, if at all, any more.
The only stories that we know for certain still exist are the ones collected and written down by ethnographers—the Yurok stories by A. L Kroeber, for instance, or the Makah stories by Judge James Swan—a century and more ago. Deborah Carver, an independent scholar, followed up the collected Yurok stories by tracking down the descendants of one storyteller and asking if they had heard the stories. “Nobody in the present had,” she says, except for one guy and his grandmother.
David Lewis, an anthropologist, independent scholar, and a member of the Grand Ronde tribe, never heard the old stories growing up, “only in my adult life,” he says, “since I’ve been working for the tribe.” And when someone did tell the stories, it was only “because I asked.” So the existing stories have the same caveats that archeological artifacts do: they’re incomplete, depend on what happened to be collected, and may not accurately represent the folklore at all.
The stories are incomplete in another, more fundamental, way: stories not written but told depend on having a culture that keeps telling them. In the late 1700s, Europeans began turning up regularly in the Pacific Northwest, bringing with them waves of epidemics, most notably smallpox. Since no one knew how many indigenous people lived there then, no one knows for sure how many died, but the estimates are shocking: they range from 30 to 95 percent.
Later Europeans continued what disease began. They wanted the coastal land, the fur of its animals, and the gold underneath it, and thus began the long indigenous history of resettlement onto reservations, re-education in government- and church-run boarding schools, and outright slaughter in warfare. Whatever the motives or intents of European explorers, government agents, fur traders, gold miners, and educators, their result was cultural scorched earth. Jason Younker is an anthropologist at the University of Oregon and a member of the Coquille tribe: growing up, he explains, “my father said to forget what I knew about being Coquille because it will do you no good.”
Kill the culture and the stories die. “If you think about the history of First Nations in the last couple hundred years,” says Losey, “huge amounts of the population were lost even before ethnographers could get to them. We have no idea how many stories existed—ethnographers published a few thousand—but certainly [there were] far more than were written down.” Ruth Ludwin, the geologist at the University of Washington who collected earthquake and tsunami stories, wrote that 95 percent of the stories were lost.
But even in the few stories that are left, earthquakes and tsunamis are still so vivid that the complete range of stories must have been full of them. “There was a great storm and hail and flashes of lightning in the darkened, blackened sky, and a great and crashing ‘thunder-noise’ everywhere,” said the Hoh people of Washington. “There were also a shaking, jumping up and trembling of the earth beneath, and a rolling up of the great waters.”
Younker himself had heard at least one of the stories. He was about to leave home to begin a decade of graduate work in anthropology when his uncle took him to Sundown Mountain along the Oregon coast, and up to a high plateau, where they watched the fog coming off the ocean and moving up through a river valley. “You see, Jason, how the fog is coming in?” the uncle said, and told him a story. Not all that long ago, a great tide came in the same way, the water rushed up the valleys, drowned the villages, and covered the trees. Some people climbed into their canoes, along with long ropes they’d prepared, tied themselves to the tops of the trees, and rode out the flood. The people who hadn’t prepared long ropes were swept away and were never seen again. Younker thinks his uncle told him that story partly so that Younker could tell even younger people how to prepare, and partly to say, “make sure you keep your ropes long and your connections to home are well-maintained so you can pull yourself back to home. Because you really can’t separate the past from the present.”
Robert Dennis, Chief Councillor of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation in British Columbia, had also heard stories. When he was 11 or 12 years old, he used to visit his great-grandfather, who’d been chief of the Huu-ay-aht for decades. “He’d say, ‘I’m going to tell you things that might be important in your life, and this could happen again.’” One of his stories was about his great-grandfather who lived at Pachena Bay, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. One night the land shook, and a big wave smashed into the beach, and the people who lived on the bay were all killed. But the people who lived on high ground, the water couldn’t reach them, and they came out of the tsunami alive. Dennis thought his great-grandfather told him this story so Dennis could someday tell the story himself and because he also would be a leader responsible for his people. So years later when the Huu-ay-aht were planning a community center, they first consulted their elders, then they built the center not down in the flats but up on high ground. Now they have to stock it with food and emergency gear and keep it stocked. “I’m not going to rest,” says Dennis. “I’m going to keep pushing it. So we’re ready.”
The ground moves and doesn’t stop moving, and almost no one survives the tsunami. So get off the beach. Go up into the hills. Build on high ground. Tie your boats with long ropes. Make sure your children know, as Robert Dennis’s great-grandfather said, that this is “what this land does at times.” And don’t bother trying to separate the present from the past.
It’s a nightmare. Whether it happens to you or someone you love, or just someone in your community, it is a trauma with vast ripple effects. Rape. Sexual violence. Child molestation. Just naming the crime is uncomfortable, scary, traumatizing. Imagine if it happened to you, to your best friend or sibling, and it’s every parent’s worst nightmare to think it could happen to your child.
“Victims might hold onto an assault for years without saying anything,” said Tulalip Chairman Mel Sheldon. “In the past, when they found the courage, or the right situation came up where they could talk about it, the statute of limitations may have passed. There was no justice for them. This is about sending a message to those that were victimized, letting them know that we care and from this day forward there will be justice no matter when the crime happened.”
According to the Department of Justice National Crime Victimization survey 284,350 people were victims of rape or sexual assault nationally. This doesn’t include domestic violence or intimate partner violence, which often includes a sexual assault component.
“We know Native American women are three times more likely to be sexually assaulted,” said Tulalip Prosecutor Brian Kilgore. “It’s an epidemic and it drives a lot of the trauma and grief behind the drug epidemic.”
Only a fraction of sexual assaults are ever reported and fewer still are prosecuted. The reasons why are far from simple. They run the gamut from cultural norms to the physical, financial and psychological pros and cons of reporting. Particularly, since the majority of sexual assaults are committed by someone known, or related to the victim.
A few of the lifelong effects of sexual assault include post-traumatic stress disorder, inability to form healthy attachments, sexual dysfunction, depression and anxiety. This is also further complicated by the reactions of those close to the victim when the victim discloses the crime. The fear of losing their support systems, or worse, being shunned or blamed for the assault, often stops victims in their tracks.
“This is about sending a message to those that were victimized, letting them know that we care and from this day forward there will be justice no matter when the crime happened.”
– Mel Sheldon, Tulalip Tribes Chairman
“If you have 100 sexual assault victims, maybe 10 or 15 will get reported,” explained Aaron Verba, the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Investigator for the Tulalip Prosecutor’s Office. “You might file three and then when it comes to a guilty verdict, maybe you’re down to one. It really comes down to the cost for the victim,” he continued. “There’s a 99 percent chance that you were victimized by someone you know or are related to.”
Because the perpetrator is often part of the community, peers and family may be unwilling to believe the crime happened. In many cases not believing the victim is a form of self-protection, Aaron described. Families don’t want to see another family member as an offender.
“Everyone is victimized,” he said. “For the family, if they support the victim sometimes they have to admit, ‘I believe this bad thing happened to you and I may have unknowingly been involved in the grooming process.’ The family has to decide whether it’s safer for them to support the victim or the perpetrator.”
Oftentimes, it’s easier to simply deny that the crime happened, to blame circumstances or even blame the victim. Jade Carela, of the Child Advocacy Center.
“Why don’t they come forward?” she asked. “As a community member, I feel like the community support isn’t there yet. We have sex predators in our community that hold high positions or spiritual positions in our tribe. Victims have to wonder, ‘Why would I come out in a community that still holds these people up? I’m not going to get support.’ In the past when they were ready, the statute of limitations may have been up, and then it was too late.”
“It’s especially hard to disclose if a victim has seen another victim disclose and it went badly for them. Sometimes people justcarry that trauma around with them,” Aaron continued. “It’s a conversation we have with every victim that walks in here. Or they may be thinking I’m going to put this person away for the rest of his life, and you have to have an honest and frank conversation about the fact that we may not get 40 years, or even 30. This person may be back in the community in one year.”
Particularly in Native American communities, after the perpetrator serves time, community will be looking to reintegrate the person into everyday life. That means that the victim will likely encounter the perpetrator at community events, family events and everyday activities like going to the grocery store.
“When you sit down and tell people realistically what is going to happen, sometimes they change their mind,” said Aaron.
With all of the obstacles and potential fallout surrounding sexual abuse, there are just as many positive reasons to disclose a sex crime.
Brian explained that most rapists have a history of sex crimes, and unless they’re prosecuted, a future. Making sure that a perpetrator doesn’t hurt someone else is a huge incentive for some victims.
“Rape kits are expensive to test,” said Brian. “The State of Ohio had thousands of untested rape kits sitting on a shelf and they paid to have them all tested. When they did they found a pattern because most rapists are serial rapists. It’s not a comfortable thing to say, ‘I was raped,’ but there’s a good chance if they’ve done it to you, they’ve done it to other people. The only way to stop them is to shine some daylight on it.”
Removing the statute of limitations on sex crimes isn’t just an empty political move, said Jade, it’s a step towards justice, healing for victims and an overall healthier community.
“As a community, we can show these victims that we love them by not being secretive about this. We need to educate our children, and come forward. Know that from here forward, whenever you are ready, we can still prosecute the crimes that happened to you.
“We always talk about the drug epidemic,” she continued. “Drugs are a symptom, they’re not the cause. The root cause is that when these drug addicts were little kids, things happened to them. If we want to eradicate drug use on the reservation, what we need to do now is keep our children safe.”
Aaron agreed, “There’s an incredibly high correlation between drug use and trauma. If you poll all the people who come through our court for drug offense, I’m guessing that 99.99% of them would have some sort of emotional abuse, neglect, physical abuse, or sexual abuse. Ultimately there’s a reason that you use drugs to change your reality, usually it’s because your reality sucks.”
Last, both Jade and Aaron agreed, disclosure is about healing.
“The women coming out now were children when this happened to them,” Jade said. “Hopefully, now they’ll feel safe enough to tell the reality about what happened to them so that they can get help. So that they don’t pass that on to their children.”
Aaron pointed to the new law as a sign of the changing times. But family support is going to be even more valuable.
“The important thing is how we support a victim,” he said. “When they disclose, they need to know they’ll be believed and someone will do something about it. The big thing about disclosure is that’s when you start healing. You can’t truly heal a wound until you take care of it, you can cover it up, you can ignore it or pretend it didn’t happen, but you can’t truly heal.”
Aaron also pointed out that sexual assault leaves scars that can take generations to heal.
“I heard once that it takes seven generations for sexual abuse to get out of a family,” he said. “That’s if the first person actually gets treatment, resolves issues and gets back to a somewhat healthy way. That person is still going to pass some of it on. You can’t not pass your life experiences on to your children, whether you know you’re doing it or not. We have people who have kept that stuff hidden for 30 or 40 years. The people on this reservation are still dealing with the effects of sexual abuse in boarding schools.”
This resolution is not retroactive. If the statute of limitations has already expired, the crime may not be prosecuted in Tulalip Court. However, Brian explained, it’s still worthwhile to report it.
“If you have DNA evidence, the federal statute of limitations runs from when you test the evidence,” he said. “For a lot of folks, the police may have a current file on the perpetrator, and any information will help them in their investigation. We can never promise that a case is going to be prosecutable, but we don’t know if it’s never reported.”
If you were the victim or witness of a sexual assault, or any crime, the first step is to call the police, regardless of how much time has passed. In emergencies always call 911. For non-emergencies you can reach the Tulalip Police Department at 360-716-4608.
On Tuesday, September 15, the Tulalip Heritage Lady Hawks hosted the Lopez Island Lobos at the Francy Sheldon gymnasium. It was the first game of the 2015-2016 volleyball season and home opener for the Lady Hawks. Coming off a very disappointing season last year, that saw them win only one set and zero matches, the Lady Hawks were excited to start fresh.
Unfortunately, there were some behind the scenes issues with their previous coach, and for reasons unknown she was replaced last minute by Tulalip Heritage Athletic Director, Tina Brown. Coach Tina spent the last couple weeks with the Lady Hawks going over volleyball basics and focusing on conditioning.
In the 1st set the Lady Hawks would fall 16-25, followed shortly thereafter by a quick 2nd set 9-25. However, in the 3rd set the Lady Hawks showed signs of their dedication to teamwork as they fought and scraped for every point they could muster. After falling behind 7-13, the Lady Hawks rallied to take a 15-14 lead behind the serving of #10 Keryn Parks and #13 Jaylin Rivera. The Lopez Island Lobos wouldn’t be denied and went on to win the 3rd and final set 25-20.
Losing the match 0-3 was a bummer, but captain #1 Myrna Redleaf was upbeat after the loss, saying “I thought we did really well compared to last year, especially going against our rivals from Lopez Island. I feel we did really well for our first match of the year. We have a lot of new girls playing this year, and we’re all still getting used to playing with each other and learning each other’s tendencies. We were really nervous in the first couple sets, but in the last set we relaxed and just had fun and our play was better.”
Myrna Redleaf, captain #1. Photo/Micheal Rios
Going forward, Myrna says the team will look to improve their communication most of all. The Lady Hawks take on Highland Christion on Friday, September 18. It’s a home game and starts at 5:00 p.m.
Tulalip tribal member Jo-E-Dee is one of three We R Native youth ambassadors reaching out to young Natives by promoting World Suicide Prevention Month in a YouTube video featuring Native youth who are survivors of suicide or suicide attempts. Their message: #WeNeedYouHere. Photo/Micheal Rios, Tulalip News
by Micheal Rios, Tulalip News
When it comes to suicide prevention, every day matters. In honor of World Suicide Prevention Month (September), the Tulalip Tribes thank those that work in our community and take action every day to bring suicide prevention services and awareness practices to our tight-knit community.
World Suicide Prevention Day, which first started in 2003, is recognized annually on September 10 and aims to:
Raise awareness that suicide is preventable
Improve education about suicide
Spread information about suicide awareness
Decrease stigmatization regarding suicide
Tulalip tribal member Jo-E-Dee Fryberg is only 17 years-old, yet she has found a passion for helping her people. She has focused on suicide prevention by helping youth in her Tulalip community and other communities succeed by finding hope where hope doesn’t seem to exist.
Jo-E-Dee is one of three We R Native youth ambassadors reaching out to young Natives by promoting World Suicide Prevention Month in a YouTube video featuring Native youth who are survivors of suicide or suicide attempts. Their message: #WeNeedYouHere.
“We’ve been losing a lot of kids to suicide. It’s something that never stops. But I’m hoping that with this generation we can finally stand up, talk to someone, and seek help for what we’re feeling, instead of letting this cycle of youth suicide continue,” says Jo-E-Dee. “The #WeNeedYouHere message, it speaks to people my age and from communities like mine.”
We R Native is a multimedia health resource for Native teens and young adults run by the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board. They are a comprehensive health resource for Native youth, by Native youth, providing content and stories about the topics that matter most to them. We R Native strives to promote holistic health and positive growth in our local communities and nation at large.
Native youth ambassadors from across the nation began spreading the message for suicide prevention and awareness over the summer, “helping to spread positive vibes and create positive change in their local communities,” We R Native said in a press release.
Creating awareness that suicide can be prevented is their first project. To increase the visibility of their campaign they created the hashtag #WeNeedYouHere, and individually they are speaking out.
Suicide has personally affected ambassador Jo-E-Dee. She shares how her involvement in canoe journeys and pow-wows helped her cope with her brother’s death, and how she feels personally invested in spreading the #WeNeedYouHere message.
“My brother [Clinton “Crazy Wolf” Fryberg] committed suicide in 2010. His death changed me forever. I became suicidal and didn’t know how to deal with those thoughts and feelings. I didn’t know how to talk about it,” recalls Jo-E-Dee. “Those of us who struggle with suicidal thoughts and feelings, we don’t really understand what it is we’re going through. I went to treatment, and through therapy learned how to talk about what I was feeling. I learned why I was feeling suicidal and how to find my way back to living a good life.”
This challenge of suicide prevention hits home for a lot of us. Suicide is a very tough issue, but addressing the tough issues and speaking openly to let our people know that we care is crucial to the healing process.
“Here’s some things I can do if I’m having suicidal thoughts: call someone and flat out tell them ‘I’m feeling suicidal and I’m scared. I don’t know what to do’,” says Joe-E-Dee. “Going to church and staying invested in our cultural activities warms our hearts, you know, like you feel happy when go and it makes you want to keep on going back and doing what you are doing. I felt hopeless before, and if you feel hopeless this is what you need to know: there’s always room for something new and it’s never too late to start something good.”
If you need help, or to give help, call 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or text START to 741741 to chat via text.
According to the World Health Organization, nearly 3,000 people on average commit suicide daily. About one million people die by suicide each year. Suicide rates are at an all-time high for U.S. military veterans. In addition, for every person who commits suicide, 20 or more others attempt to end their lives. What’s obvious from the World Health Organization statistics is that suicide does not discriminate upon race, age, or gender. It is a social issue that plagues everyone, whether directly or indirectly.
The effects of suicide are not limited to those who die. Suicide is a serious public health problem that has shattered the lives of millions of people, families, and communities nationwide. We can all take action to reduce its toll. A variety of strategies are available for individuals and organizations across the United States to help prevent suicide.
On the local, tribal level the Tulalip Tribes have been hard at work on a Suicide Prevention Plan that aims to stop Tribal member suicides, based on the belief that suicide is preventable in our community.
Although suicides occur everywhere in the world, Native Americans are disproportionately affected by suicide and the lasting impact it has on our tight-knit communities. In Tulalip, we recognize the role that historical trauma plays in the mental health of our people. The events of history cannot be changed and the effects of trauma now exist in our bodies and the struggle for healthy coping skills and mental resiliency is a challenge. This plan is vital in our journey to healing; we know that every life is important and we are dedicated to educating our people and preventing unnecessary death.
Tulalip community members who are interested in receiving assistance with mental wellness should call the Family Services main number to schedule an intake for individual or family counseling: 360-716-4400 (18 and over) or 360-716-3284 (under 18).
Warning signs of suicidal behavior
Everyone can play a role in preventing suicide by being aware of the warning signs of suicidal behaviors:
Talking about wanting to die; feeling hopeless, trapped, or in unbearable pain; being a burden to others.
Looking for a way to kill oneself.
Increasing the use of alcohol or drugs.
Acting anxious, agitated, or reckless.
Withdrawing or feeling isolated.
Showing rage or talking about seeking revenge.
Displaying extreme mood swings.
What you can do
If you believe someone is at risk of suicide:
Ask them if they are thinking about killing themselves. (This will not put the idea into their heads, or make it more likely that they will attempt suicide.)
Call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifelines at 800-273-TALK (8255).
Take the person to an emergency room or seek help from a medical or mental health professional.
Smaller than average coho and pink salmon are returning to local rivers, and the warm water blob off the coast could be to blame.
The runs are smaller in both number and weight. The average coho size in the recent catch of a Squaxin Island tribal fisherman was just 3.4 pounds, less than half of the 8-pound average weight of a coho.
Lorraine Loomis, NWIFC chair and Swinomish fisheries manager, observed the trend in smaller pink salmon in a recent fishery.
“Where they’re usually four and a half, five pounds, they’re about three, three and a half pounds now,” she said. “So they’re quite small.”
Dower and other researchers have been concerned what might be happening to the important food source as the water off the B.C. coast has warmed over the past year and a half.
“We were quite keen to get out here and see what was going on,” he said.
“One way to think about plankton is you’ve got your crunchies and you’ve got your squishies.”
The species that usually dominate in colder water tend to be “crunchies,” he said: krill and other shrimp-like animals that are high in nutritious fatty acids and oils.
“What we’re seeing is a lot of [squishies], gelatinous types of zooplankton, and they’re not nearly as nutritious as the normal species of plankton that we find off the coast here.”
TULAIP, WA (September 15, 2015) — Seattle Premium Outlets® will host a job fair on Saturday, September 19. Participating merchants are looking to add staff ahead of the holiday season. People will have an opportunity to talk with store managers about available opportunities, submit resumes, and fill out applications, available on site.
Participating retailers include:
Abercrombie & Fitch, Adidas, Ann Taylor Factory Store, Auntie Anne’s Soft Pretzels, BCBG MaxAzria, Brooks Brothers Factory Store, Chicos, Clarins, Coach, Columbia Sportswear, Crocs, Dr. Martens, Eddie Bauer, Fossil, Guess Factory Store, Gymboree, Joe’s Jeans, Justice, Kate Spade New York, Kenneth Cole, Kitchen Collection, Le Creuset, Little Tokyo, L’Occitane, Maidenform, Movado, Polo Ralph Lauren, The North Face, True Religion, Under Armour, Victorinox Swiss Army, Vince, Watch Station International and White House Black Market.
Various positions open include full-time, part-time and seasonal support. Stores will be ready to hire sales managers, sales associates, keyholders and stock associates.
