by RoNeisha Mullen | The Flint Journal

FLINT TWP. — Local Native American education programs are seeing declining numbers, a sad statement on families rejecting their heritage, some educators say.

“For so long, Native Americans had been taught to deny their culture because they’d be tormented,” said Jean Keen, a Native American specialist with the Carman-Ainsworth/Westwood Heights program.

“Now, we’re having a hard time getting them to embrace it. They don’t understand the point. Schools spend a lot of time chasing families they know are eligible.”

Such local programs are trying to find more students but that can be difficult in the face of the cultural apathy, not to mention declining Native American numbers.

“A lot of our students don’t know that they are of Native American heritage,” said Sue Diebel, a Carman-Ainsworth teacher who’s part of an advisory group over the program. “Tribes are becoming extinct because the older people are dying and the young people don’t know their culture.”

At least six districts in Genesee County have federally funded Native American education programs, offering free tutoring, after-school activities that focus on culture and awareness, and summer day camp.

The Carman-Ainsworth/Westwood program expects to see a drop of 30 students next school year, from about 525 to 495. That means a loss in cash for the program, which receives about $250 per student.

Keen is looking to reduce the $132,973 annual budget by $7,000.

In order to enroll, parents of students must verify their Indian heritage and youngsters must identify their tribe and family background.

According to the 2000 census, 6,870 people in Genesee County define themselves as at least part Native American. Flint Township was home to 556 of them.

Enrollment also is dropping for the Flint School District’s Native American program, but not necessarily over cultural issues, one official says.

“People are leaving public schools,” said Veda Balla, program officer of Indian Education for Flint. “Also, people of mixed ancestry are only reporting one race, which means we don’t know that they’re Native American because they didn’t report it.”

Balla who’s been with the district since 1992, said she’s had as many as 700 students enrolled in the program at one time. This year there are 311 and next year only 226 are expected.

Balla said she’s pretty good at scaling back, but “worse-case scenario I’d cut my own hours to save money.”

Proponents say those kind of reductions are too bad, given the obvious benefits of the program and one-on-one time that students get.

Antoinette Aubrey, parent member and chairwoman of the Carman/Westwood program, has three children in Westwood, including two in special education. Aubrey said the program helps her children academically.

“If you read something to him, he doesn’t comprehend it,” Aubrey said of her son who attends McMonagle Elementary.

“But if you put it in front of him and show it to him, he understands it better. He’s almost up to his grade because through the tutoring and this program, he gets the help he needs.”

Diebel said the after-school cultural programs can only introduce heritage, not teach it. She said parents should teach their children to embrace their culture.

“If you have even one drop of Native American blood take pride in that because those are the people who were here first,” Diebel said. “You are the ones who can keep what is left of your tribe alive.”

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By Travis Coleman Journal staff writer

SIOUX CITY — The proposed creation of a Commission on Native American Affairs is up for a vote in the Iowa House of Representatives after being unanimously approved by the House State Government Committee this week.

The commission aims to work with tribal governments, groups and members in the areas of human rights, access to justice, economic equality and the elimination of discrimination.

Gov. Chet Culver will appoint an 11-person committee with four people representing the land-holding tribes in Iowa: Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa, Omaha Tribe of Nebraska, Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska and Ponca Tribe of Nebraska.

Of seven other appointed members, at least one must be a tribal member living on a tribal settlement or reservation in Iowa. Five members will serve two-year terms and six will serve four-year terms.

“There are over 115,000 Native Americans in Iowa, and they deserve the same respect and protections that other Iowans enjoy every day,” said Rep. Wes Whitead of Sioux City.

Whitead serves on the State Government Committee and supported the measure. The commission would be under the Department of Human Rights along with the commissions on African Americans, Latino Affairs and Asian and Pacific Islanders.

Appointment of members is set for completion by Sept. 1.

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Texas State Technical College Waco
Reporter: Mary Drennon
Email Address: mary.drennon@tstc.edu

WACO) – Colorful costumes, social Native American dance and song and much more will be on tap this spring at Texas State Technical College Waco.

The Native American Student Association of TSTC will host the 2008 Waco Intertribal Powwow from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturday, March 8, in the gym of the Murray Watson Jr. Recreation Center on Campus Drive. The event is sponsored by the Four Winds Intertribal Society Inc.

The event is free and the public is invited to attend.

Highlights of the event include a traditional Gourd Dance with Head Gourd Dancer Bobby Cazares at noon and again at 5 p.m. Grand Entry will be 1 p.m. and again at 6 p.m. Ray Duncan will serve as Master of Ceremony, with Phil Stucker as Head Man and Rita Deer Sky as Head Lady. Drum group is Lodge Pole Singers and Arena Director is Steve Zavala.

There are no drugs, alcohol, firearms or pets allowed at the event. Spectators are welcome to bring lawn chairs, as seating will be limited.

Vendors or dancers interested in participating in the 2008 Powwow can contact Leah Williams via e-mail at waconasa@tstc.edu or call, toll-free, 800-792-8784, ext. 3622.

For more information, visit the NASA Club Web Site.

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By Blaine Kyllo

Propaganda Games was formed three years ago by a group of former Electronic Arts staffers. Within months, it was acquired by Buena Vista Games, now Disney Interactive Studios. In an interview with the Georgia Straight at Propaganda’s Vancouver offices, general manager and vice president Josh Holmes said the company had been working on an original concept for a third-person action game, but scrapped it when it won the right to develop the new Turok video game for Touchstone, a Disney brand.

The first Turok game—1997’s Turok: Dinosaur Hunter for the Nintendo 64—was one of the earliest first-person shooters produced for console gaming systems. Turok first appeared in a 1954 comic book in a story by Gaylord DuBois, who was known for writing outdoor-adventure comics about such characters as Tarzan, Roy Rogers, and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Turok changed over the years, depending on who was using him and for what purpose, but one thing has remained constant: Turok is a Native American.

“Reimagining is in vogue in entertainment today,” game director Joel Manners told the Straight. He cited Batman Begins and Battlestar Galactica as good examples of how characters have been reinvented. “There are really good stories that need to be retold in a way that is relevant to today,” Manners said. “There’s nothing irrelevant about dinosaurs,” which feature prominently in the new Turok game.

The development team was acutely aware that its protagonist was aboriginal. “It means a lot,” admitted Manners, “and it doesn’t mean anything.” The game, he explained, doesn’t make a point about heritage; it makes a point about heroism. In an effort to avoid clichés and stereotypes, Manners said, they simply treated the characters and the story with respect. “When you justify a character because of their heritage,” he said, “you have to be cautious.

“The fact that Turok is of one heritage or another is not important,” Manners continued. “He’s a hero. The heroism that he is displaying comes from his heritage, but it’s something anyone is capable of.”

Manners said the development group talked about other game genres in early meetings, but never seriously considered them. “The first-person perspective lends an intimacy. Having dinosaurs coming at you is central to the feeling of terror. It’s not as scary when you see creatures jumping on someone else.”

Propaganda, which increased its staff as it developed Turok, now employs about 150 people. Holmes said that in recent months, they’ve been organizing the company into two teams, and they’re already in preproduction on their next two titles, one of which is an action role-playing game. “We’d like to get to a point where we’ve got two games in production and one in concept,” he said. Propaganda won’t get much bigger than 200 employees, though, an optimal size for the studio, according to Holmes.

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By Greg Flakus, VoA News

They have been called the Greatest Generation for what they did to stop the Nazis in Europe and the Imperialist Japanese army in Asia and the Pacific. Veterans of World War II are said to be dying at the rate of 1,000 a day. Among those still with us are a few members of Native American Indian tribes, whose unique languages played a crucial role in the war effort. VOA correspondent Greg Flakus sought out one of them in Pine Ridge, South Dakota recently and filed this report about the last of the Lakota Code Talkers

Navajo Code Talkers

September 27, 2007 – Pine Ridge, South Dakota – The language is Lakota, one of three dialects of the people collectively called Sioux, a tribe of hunters and warriors that once roamed all over the northern plains. The language is divided into three dialects – Dakota, Nakota and Lakota – but any person who speaks one dialect can understand the others.

Clarence Wolf Guts is an 83-year-old Lakota warrior whose ability to speak his native language played a role in defeating the Japanese in World War II.

“I helped win the war, I helped, me and my buddies,” he said.

With a surname that many non-Indians in the US military found amusing, Clarence Wolf Guts took his fair share of teasing, but he soon found himself assigned with other Lakota speakers to a special unit. The so-called code talkers would send and receive messages in their language. Similar programs were operated by the U.S. Marines using mainly Navajo speakers. The Japanese were never able to understand the messages.

Clarence Wolf Guts

It was dangerous work, often carried out near the front lines, where Clarence says he saw plenty of combat.

“We got shot at and we did some shooting ourselves. You know it is not easy shooting at another human being,” he said.

Until a couple of years ago most people who knew Clarence Wolf Guts on the Pine Ridge reservation had no idea that he had been a code talker because he seldom spoke about it. Former Pine Ridge neighbor Charles Trimble now directs the Institute of American Indian Studies at the University of South Dakota.

Charles Trimble

“We did not know it,” he said. “I did not know until a couple of years ago when I was reading something. He never talked about it. A lot of times veterans would come home, especially during World War II and you would very seldom, except when two or three got together, hear them talk about that-about the horrible things that happened around them or anything else.”

It would be difficult to form a Lakota code-talker unit today because most of the estimated 8,000 speakers are elderly people and few young Lakotas can speak the language fluently. But the university offers classes in Lakota for both Indian and non-Indian students and Trimble says this helps keep the language alive.

“I think it is important,” he said. “I think it is beautiful and I think it helps a person and, certainly, it keeps the tribe alive, as a tribe.”

Trimble says the story of the Lakota code talkers is an important part of the heritage that binds tribal members together.

“There are benefits to knowing you are an Indian and accepting it, being an Indian and being proud of it and understanding it,” he said.

Clarence Wolf Guts now lives in a retirement home in Pine Ridge. He says seeing the people of his country healthy and happy is the greatest reward he gained from his service in the war.

“When I see people laughing and having a good time I realize why we were over there,” he said. “We done it for the people and if they are happy, then I am the happiest person alive.”

For many years after the war the code talkers were largely forgotten. But after military documents were declassified in the 1990s and a book came out about the Navajo code talkers, historians and news reporters sought out the surviving code talkers. There had been over a 100 of them from 17 tribes. Most of them have passed on now, but a few like Clarence Wolf Guts remain to tell the story of how they used their native tongue to help win a war.

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Science Conference Addresses Importance of Preservation

By Art Chimes, VoA News

San Francisco, CA – February 28, 2007 – There are nearly 7,000 languages on Earth, but experts say about half of them are endangered, meaning only a small and declining number of often elderly people speak the language. Major world and national languages crowd out indigenous ones, and it’s estimated that more languages became extinct in the 20th century than at any other time in history.

For scientists, the loss of a language represents a very real loss of knowledge. And that knowledge could save lives at a time when drug companies search tropical forests for biologically-based medical breakthroughs, and many if not most plant and animal species remain unknown to Western science.

Professor David Harrison of Swarthmore College decries the loss of scientific knowledge when languages die

At last week’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, David Harrison of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania said saving endangered languages could help scientists harness knowledge that might otherwise be lost.

“Vast domains of knowledge about meteorology, mathematics, weather cycles, plant and animal behavior, how to domesticate plants and animals, how to control genetic stocks exists,” Harrison stressed. “It is out there, it is fragile, it is very rapidly eroding.”

Revitalizing a dying language can help heal a community according to Daryl Baldwin, an expert on the Myaamia language and culture that once thrived in the American Midwest

When a language goes, so does culture. The Miami are a native people that once thrived in the American Midwest. Three centuries ago, their Myaamia language was widely spoken. But the language began to die out as the tribe was forced from its ancestral homeland and its members became more assimilated in mainstream America. It was essentially extinct by the 1960s. However, the language had been well documented, and Daryl Baldwin and his Myaamia Project have been working to revitalize both the language and the culture it represents.

“For communities that have been socially disrupted, the language provides an avenue by which they can mend and heal,” said Baldwin, “because embodied in that language is a great deal of information about how we relate to each other and how we relate to our landscape. And so language revitalization has been incredibly enriching. It’s been daunting. Language loss is about social change; language reclamation is also about social change.”

Hawaiian culture thrives but the language is threatened says William Wilson of the University of Hawaii

Revitalizing an endangered language is never easy. In Hawaii, the U.S. state that was an independent monarchy until 1893, the culture is strong, but the language has faced severe challenges, such as a law that prohibited teaching it in schools until two decades ago. William Wilson of the University of Hawaii says it is important to expose young Hawaiians to the language, and the subject now is taught to school children.

“So that’s increasing the numbers of speakers,” Wilson said. “In 1986, when we started, there were less than 50 children in all of Hawaii that could speak Hawaiian fluently. Now we have about 2,000 in our school system. More importantly, there are actually families that speak Hawaiian at home. And so we’ve started infant-toddler programs, where those children can come together before they go to preschool.”

Leanne Hinton of the University of California says 1:1 intensive programs are preserving native languages in her state

On the mainland, California has a tremendous heritage of language diversity, with as many as 100 native languages having been spoken there. Many are now endangered or gone entirely. Leanne Hinton of the University of California says one-on-one intensive programs are helping sustain threatened languages.

“One of them is the master-apprentice language learning program, which pairs the last speakers of native languages with younger members of the tribe who want to learn it. And we teach them the fundamentals of language immersion, and they are supposed to spend 10 or 20 hours a week just living their lives together in the language and without recourse to English,” Hinton explained.

Despite efforts like these, indigenous and other minority languages will continue to be threatened, and many likely will die off. But aggressive programs can help ensure the survival of other languages, along with the knowledge and culture they embody.

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This report originally appeared on VoA News.

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NCAI Empowers Native Youth through New Youth Ambassador Leadership Program

Release by the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI)

In an effort to expand youth leadership in  Indian Country, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) has created the Youth Ambassador Leadership Program (YALP) to acknowledge the strong leadership capabilities and skills present within both Native youth.

“Native youth are collaborating in ways that will benefit all of us in the future and this program will only enhance the way in which they coordinate their efforts to improve the lives of their peers,” said NCAI President Joe Garcia.

The two Ambassadors (male and female) and two Under-Ambassadors (male and female) will serve as spokespersons for the NCAI Youth Commission to raise public awareness about the many important issues impacting American Indians and Alaska Native youth throughout Indian County.

The competition to become YALP Ambassadors included an oration, contemporary dress, extemporaneous question, cultural presentation and debate. Contestants were also judged recommendations and grade point average. The top male and female candidates each receive an academic scholarship for $2,500.

Ambassadors:

Patricia Carter, Nez Perce Tribe, Sophomore at Northwest Indian College studying Native American Studies

“The implementation of this new program is exciting. Our strength is our diversity within the leadership program. We all have various ideas and have the drive and passion to implement new initiatives such as creating a multimedia campaign to fight drug and alcohol abuse and push for stronger possession laws. We can educate other youth about NCAI and Indian Country Initiatives.

Quintin Lopez, Tohono O’odham Nation, senior at Hasan Preparatory and Leadership School

“For the next two years as a representative, I will express my true feelings and those of the youth. They should be heard. I will do more with Native youth and have them be more outspoken about who they are and where they come from.”

Under-Ambassadors:

Marrisa Corpuz, Tlingit-Haida, freshman at the University of Alaska Southeast

“This is a wonderful opportunity for me to reach out to youth on a national level and a personal level. I am very excited to see the issues that we will be dealing with and to assist in creating solutions. I know that I am working with three wonderful Native youth and with the mergence all of our individual strengths we will make a difference and impact on Indian Nations. I can’t wait to get out and hear the voices of the Indian youth of America. I can assure you that we will represent Indian Youth across the nation to the best of our capabilities.”

Nick Stranger, Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Senior at Lake Roosevelt High School

“I look forward to this opportunity to learn more about politics and the political process in Indian Country. I’ve always been active in sports so this is something new that I can do. I’m Interested  to learn more about Native issues.”

For more information about YALP, contact Jennifer Rackliff at 202-466-7767.

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Founded in 1944, the National Congress of American Indians is the oldest, largest and most representative American Indian and Alaska Native organization in the country.  NCAI advocates on behalf of more than 250 tribal governments, 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. Learn more at http://www.ncai.org.

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NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY & CULTURE

Thsi page has Native American timelimes, documents, treaties, etc.

It also has information that is important and impacting to Native Americans.

It contains many good links to other Native American themed websites, including Native American art, history and  poetry

check it out here: http://www.teacheroz.com/Native_Americans.htm

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Here is a great site with much information, original hard to find documents, great videos and a multilingual mailing list.

Some of the sections of this site I found useful were the complete list of tribes and the listing Native leaders.

Thanks for offering such a great site!

Check them out at http://www.indigenouspeople.net/

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