Tag: Native Americans

This Photographer Is Shining a Light on the Dignity of Indigenous Women

Posted on by robbie

Indigenous women face disproportionate levels of violence. 84 percent of them experience some form of violence during their lifetimes, and one study found that in certain regions, native women face murder rates more than 10 times the national average. One photographer is using her art to call attention to the issue — and, in her own way, fight back against it.
“People go missing on the reservation like it’s going out of style,” says Toni Roth, a photographer and resident of the Yakama Indian Reservation in Toppenish, Wash.
Roth has been a photographer for the last five years, but recently her work took on an entirely new meaning. In January, Roth started taking portraits of women and girls from the Yakama tribe decked out in their traditional regalia. The photos are striking — colorful, regal and almost ferocious — and she hopes they’ll drive awareness and action on the epidemic of missing and murdered native women.  
“I wanted to portray them in their natural state,” Roth says, “showing that these women are strong, they’re independent, they’re needed in their community [and] they’re just as important as anybody else.
“I feel like if more people brought light to the situation and took it seriously, then maybe more people would get involved, and actually realize that this is an epidemic,” Roth says. “This is real, and it’s something that needs to be taken care of.”
Watch the video above to see Roth’s work and find out how you can help fight the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women.

If you have information on the whereabouts of missing individuals on the Yakama reservation, please contact the Yakima Police Department at 509-575-6200.

MORE: Serving Victims on the Rez, How Today’s Street Artists Are Mobilizing Activists

Serving Victims on the Rez

Posted on by robbie

Domestic violence has long plagued the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. But recent advancements in oil and gas drilling have brought an influx of new workers, and as the population around the reservation has grown, so too have the rate of assaults. For some family members — such as Matthew Lone Bear, whose sister, Olivia, disappeared in 2017 — the search for a missing victim means scouring the massive, roughly 1-million-acre reservation. It can often leave loved ones feeling hopeless.
That’s where TAT Victim Services comes in. The organization works with Fort Berthold’s tribal members, known as the MHA Nation, in dealing with domestic and sexual violence, human trafficking, elder abuse, and missing or murdered people on the reservation. By hosting events to raise awareness, providing survivors with safe shelter, and assisting in the opening of missing-persons cases, TAT helps tribal members in need.
Watch the video above to see the work TAT Victim Services is doing on the Fort Berthold Reservation to help families like Lone Bear’s.

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Editor’s note: Some faces and names in the video have been obscured to protect the privacy of the people involved.

When Tradition Can Help Save the Environment

Posted on by robbie

Despite generations of sustainable farming, Native American tribes have been losing touch with these practices because of health problems and a lack of knowledge concerning ancestral farming. However, some groups, including the ones below, are seeing this as an opportunity for renewal.
Traditional Native American Farmers’ Association
After noticing the move away from traditional farming in his community, Clayton Brascoupé started TNAFA back in 1992 in Santa Fe, N.M. Today, it includes more than one dozen tribes. Education is fundamental to the organization, which is why it offers workshops in seed-saving, home gardening, traditional food production, crop marketing, sustainable design and more.
White Earth Land Recovery Project
The group’s original mission was to resolve the land rights struggles of the Anishinaabes people of White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota. However, in the subsequent years, it has grown to encompass a wide range of issues, including agriculture, for the Anishinaabes as well as other tribes. White Earth produces its own food line under the Native Harvest label, as well as hosting conferences regarding indigenous farming. The group also has an impressive seed library, which not only includes collected ones, but it has also rediscovered forgotten strains. After finding squash seeds in an 800-year-old pot, the group was able to grow 50 seeds of Gete-okosomin (“really old cool squash”), according to Sustainable Cities Collective.
San Ildefonso Pueblo Community Farm Program
Anyone who is familiar with the Pueblo‘s current eight acres (comprised of numerous families’ fields) would probably be surprised to learn of its humble beginnings as a small plot in Tribal Councilman Tim Martinez’s backyard in 2010. With crops ranging from traditional varieties of corn, beans and squash to onions, lettuce, carrots, okra and more, the Pueblo is very diverse. Its emphasis, though, is truly on the community. A community-built hoop house keeps crops growing longer, and the produce is sold at local farmers’ markets to members of the neighboring communities. Integral to the Pueblo are the lessons — including watching moon cycles and migration patterns to gauge planting and harvesting times to preparing and tending crops — taught by elders to youths.
To learn about more Native American groups, click here.
MORE: Is It Possible to Grow Something on Every Rooftop?
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Ancient Native American Ceremonies Help Soldiers Overcome PTSD

Posted on by robbie

You’re probably not aware, but about 1 percent of veterans are of American Indian or Native Alaskan descent.
While this group is just a tiny percentage of our Armed Forces, Native American veterans are two to three times as likely to experience PTSD as white veterans, says Dr. Spero Manson, Ph.D., who leads the Centers for American Indian and Native Alaskan Health at the University of Colorado’s School of Public Health.
Why does this group suffer mental anguish more than others? Manson, who is a member of the Pembina-Chippewa tribe, thinks it’s because Native Americans are more likely to spend more time in combat than soldiers of other ethnicities. “The greatest predictor of trauma among veterans is, in fact, exposure to combat,” he tells Colorado Matters.
Although the issues faced by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are unique, Manson believes this problem isn’t new, extending back for as long as there have been warriors. “The returning warriors of that time came back to their local villages and communities exhibiting many of the same symptoms that veterans today, who have seen combat, do,” he says. “They’re irritable, quick to fight, they distance themselves from others. They’re very difficult to reintegrate into their communities.”
Manson believes the ancient ceremonies tribes developed to address these problems can be helpful to today’s soldiers. He cites the Lakota Wiping of Tears, “where tears are symbolically brushed from the cheeks,” as being helpful.
Manson’s own son returned troubled after serving in the Marine Corps and finally got back on his feet through a mixture of tribal and traditional medical interventions. “We just have to figure out how to…support them in the process,” Manson says.
MORE: Can Ancient Native American Traditions Heal Today’s Vets?

South Dakota’s Sustainable Plan to End Native American Poverty

Posted on by robbie

As one of the nation’s poorest areas, the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota is in need of some help. The Oglala Sioux, who occupy the land, often travel more than 120 miles to Rapid City for temporary employment and only one in five has a job. Coupled with a severe housing shortage, 69 percent of Pine Ridge residents live below the poverty line, according to the American Indian Relief Council.
But one of the youngest residents at Pine Ridge is hoping to change the dire conditions by rebuilding a sustainable and affordable community on an empty stretch of 34 acres on the reservation. Nick Tilsen, a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation and owner of the Thunder Valley Community Economic Development Corporation, has an ambitious plan to build affordable single-family homes and co-housing spaces with green features including onsite wind power and an aquaponics greenhouse.  
Using a new, native-owned construction company, the project aims to create homes and jobs for the overcrowded and underemployed population. Tilsen’s development company has already acquired the South Dakota land to build the community, but as Fast Company points out, the area is ill-defined as to where it falls in county lines.

“You don’t have a county able to charge property taxes, which is how counties fund themselves. Without that revenue, you don’t have a revenue stream to build lights,electricity, roads, infrastructure and sewage. Usually it’s the county that does that,” says Marjorie Kelly, a director of special projects with The Democracy Collaborative, which is supporting the idea.

But that hasn’t stopped Tilsen, whose teamed up with an architect from Kansas City-based green firm BNIM. The project was a finalist in the Buckminster Fuller 2014 Fuller Challenge. Tilsen’s goal is to build 30 residences within the first few years, but Tilsen is aiming to use it as a model for other reservations throughout the country.

“It’s a model for Indian country — how can you do sustainable development and affordable housing that’s really ecologically sustainable?” Kelly adds. “A number of federal agencies that work with Native Americans are watching it.”

MORE: Could a Basic Income Cut American Poverty in Half?

Cycling Tourism Has the Potential to Transform This Hardscrabble New Mexico Town

Posted on by robbie

While Gallup, New Mexico is known as the “Heart of Indian Country” because of the many nearby reservations and its sizable presence of Native Americans (who comprise 76 percent of Gallup’s McKinley County), that wasn’t always the case.
Back in the 1970s and 80s, Gallup became notorious for something else: The fact that, each year, police put 30,000 people in the drunk tank. Many of those arrested were Native Americans who flocked to Gallup since it was one of the nearest places where they could purchase alcohol, Jonathan Thompson writes for the High Country News.
But now a group of entrepreneurs, Gallup boosters, and outdoor enthusiasts are working to make the town famous for something much better (and undoubtedly, much healthier) — mountain biking.
Chuck Van Drunen, who lived near a vacant lot known as the Brickyard, contributed to the bike-centered transformation of this gritty town. Until 1960, the Brickyard held kilns for brick-making, but after that, it became a neglected piece of property where drunkards and transients hung out. Van Drunen tired of booze-addled people wandering in the alley behind his house, so he started leading bicycle trail rides over the Brickyard.
It caught on, and Gallup’s mayor Jackie McKinney convinced the owners of the Brickyard to donate or sell the land to the city. Community members hired a bike park designer to plan proper trails and enlisted the Youth Conservation Corps to clean things up. In September, the Gallup Brickyard Bike Park officially opened.
Thompson writes, “Over the last 15 years, local bike-advocates have built and designated dozens of miles of trails in the nearby desert and forests and spiffed up the old downtown.”
Various bike enthusiasts formed the nonprofit Gallup Trails 2010, working to establish trails throughout Gallup and the nearby Zuni mountains. And while no one thinks Gallup is on track to become the next Moab — Utah’s mountain biking mecca — the town now hosts mountain biking races and is beginning to attract outdoor adventure tourists.
Does the enthusiasm for mountain biking have the ability to turn around Gallup’s tough economic situation? Currently, more than a third of McKinley County’s population live below the poverty line, and its unemployment rate sits at 8.5 percent, substantially higher than New Mexico’s overall rate of 6.8 percent. Still, the bike trails and cycling-centered tourism promotion seem to be moving the city in the right direction.
Lindsay Mapes, the owner of Zia Rides, a Gallup bike-race promoter, said that when she used to tell people where she lived, she’d get a pitying or disgusted “Gallup Look.” “Now it’s like: ‘Oh, yeah, I love it there. The trails are great!’ I love it when I see locals interacting with someone in the outdoor community, boasting about the assets we have. There’s a lot of community pride.”
“Sometimes, I see it as a revolution,” she said. “This group is really using the bike as an agent of change.”
MORE: The Two-Wheeler to the Rescue
 
 

How Straw Bales Helped Solve an Indian Reservation’s Desperate Need for Homes

Posted on by robbie

On South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, 4,000 Oglala Sioux families are in desperate need of homes, and now several groups are working together to solve this problem in an environmentally-friendly way. The Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation has teamed up with the University of Colorado’s Native American Sustainable Housing Initiative to build four prototype houses. South Dakota college students are helping to build homes insulated with straw bales or packed-earth blocks, with radiant floor heating that should save its future inhabitants money, as well as a shallow foundation that’s more energy-efficient than the drafty basements usually found on the reservation. They plan to build 100 such homes, and fulfill the families’ energy needs through solar panels and other energy-saving techniques.
Nick Tilsen, the executive director of the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation told Nate Seltenrich of High Country News, “We’re trying to build a net-zero affordable house. We’re looking for these 34 acres to be almost like a laboratory for Indian Country, for Pine Ridge, and for the country when it comes to sustainable communities.”
MORE: Can Ancient Native American Techniques Heal Today’s Vets? 

How a Simple Rule Change Will Make It Easier for Native Americans to Go to College

Posted on by robbie

The Arizona Board of Regents just made it easier for Native American students to attend college in state. A new residency policy lets enrolled members of any sovereign federally recognized tribe whose reservation land lies at least partially in Arizona to be eligible for in-state tuition at the state’s public universities.
The change is a significant shift from the old rule, which required students to show proof of residence on tribal lands to qualify for in-state tuition. That often turned out to be an arduous process, given that many Navajo families who live on the reservation have mailing addresses elsewhere, because, say, there’s no local post office where they reside. The new policy will require students to prove tribal membership instead of physical residence, which can be done by providing a certificate from the tribe’s Office of Vital Records.
The Board of Regents is hoping that starting in the spring, when the new policy takes effect, tribal members who are currently attending school out of state or thinking about doing so will be persuaded to come back home.

Can Ancient Native American Traditions Heal Today’s Vets?

Posted on by robbie

For centuries, many Native American tribes held traditional rituals when their young men returned from battle to help reintegrate them into society. Today, some are performing these ceremonies to help veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Utah filmmaker Taki Telonidis of the Western Folklife Center in Salt Lake City is shooting a documentary about these traditions and their effects on returning vets, many of whom come home with “invisible drama,” he told the Elko Free Daily Press. Telonidis is documenting the traditions of warriors among the Blackfeet tribe and the work of one Shosone-Paiute medicine man who conducts sweat lodges for all interested veterans at the George Wallen Veteran Affairs Center in Salt Lake.