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United Indians of All Tribes Foundation Announces 40th Anniversary Celebration Activities Seattle, WA - March 1, 2010 - On the morning of March 8, 1970, over one hundred Native Americans and their allies scaled the fences of Ft. Lawton Army Base in Seattle as part of a peaceful takeover of land scheduled to be sold or given to the city as surplus.United Indians of All Tribes Foundation has announced a series of community celebrations commemorating the 40th anniversary of this historic event that led to its founding and the creation of the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center.United Indians' 40th anniversary events include: Monday, March 8, 2010 1:00pm - 3:30pm March from Discovery Park North Parking Lot to Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center. A blessing by Duwamish Chairwoman Cecile Hanson will be followed by the march led by Head Start students, participants in the original invasion and community members. Dancing and drumming will be followed by light refreshments. Saturday, March 27, 2010 1:00pm - 10:00pm First annual Head Start Pow Wow Grand Entries at 1 pm and 6 pm Head Start students and employees past and present, please join us in celebrating this cornerstone program of United Indians. All community members, dancers and drums are encouraged to attend. Sunday, March 28, 2010 1:00pm - 6:00pm Community Dinner Along with a community dinner, the program includes a performance by Red Eagle Soaring and community members sharing their favorite Bernie Whitebear stories.All events are open to the public, free of charge and will take place at Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center. During the original takeover, protestors scaled razor wire fences, endured beatings and incarceration. Attracting support from celebrities including Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, Marlon Brando and Wilt Chamberlain, and led by the charismatic Bernie Whitebear, the activists persevered for months. They finally succeeded in getting the city to lease part of Discovery Park for a Native cultural center.United Indians' Executive Director Marty Bluewater states, "On behalf of those who continue to benefit from the sacrifices of the brave few who participated in the takeover, we say thank you. Our mission is to ensure your legacy lives on through our work in the community."About United Indians of All Tribes Foundation United Indians of All Tribes Foundation is a 501c3 non-profit organization founded in Seattle, Washington in 1970. The mission of United Indians is to foster and sustain a strong sense of identity, tradition, and well-being among the Indian people in the Puget Sound area by promoting their cultural, economic, and social welfare. For more information about United Indians or to make a donation, visit www.unitedindians.org. |
2nd Annual National Forum on Dropout Prevention Strategies for Native and Tribal Communities
April 18-21, 2010
Sheraton Crescent Hotel
Phoenix, AZ
The State of Alaska, NARF, Northern Justice Project and ACLU Reach Settlement In Yup'ik Language and Voter Assistance Case. Full Story at: http://tinyurl.com/y9eycjt
Calif. race-based admissions law http://preview.tinyurl.com/yhw8fnl
Suzan Harjo v. Pro-Football Inc., a case that began in 1992, centered on whether a dispute over a potentially offensive trademark can be dismissed if the challenge was not filed promptly. Though the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruled in 1999 that the name was disparaging and should be changed, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. later decided that the challengers had waited too long to file their petition. The Redskins first registered the mascot with the Patent and Trademark Office in 1967. Full story at: http://tinyurl.com/yzo6oeu
Karuk Language Program Workshop November 7 & 8, 2009 By Laura Grant Ruth Rouvier, Language Program Coordinator for the Karuk Language Department, presented a workshop in Yreka, California, at the gracious Yreka Tribal Housing Authority council chamber on Saturday and Sunday, November 7 and 8. Karuk master speakers and their apprentices learned how to edit and archive digital video recordings that feature the Karuk language. Apprentices have been busy recording their master speakers since January 2009 when they received cameras and their initial training on videotaping. The recordings featured a fine variety of topics from traditional fishing practices to storytelling to descriptions of the weather. Funding from the Administration for Native Americans (ANA) allowed the Karuk Tribe to launch this three-year project that focuses on training Karuk language apprentices in best practices for video documentation, transcription, and analysis techniques for the preservation of their language. By the end of the project, apprentices will have new technical skills to offer the community. The Karuk Language Department in collaboration with the tribe, will create an archive all the recordings. It is a great opportunity for the elder speakers and eager language learners to spend time together. Master speakers attending were Vina Smith, Charlie Thom, Lucille Albers, Sonny Davis, and Bud Johnson. Apprentices were Crispen McAllister, Crystal Richardson, Florrine Super, Tamara Alexander, and Roy Arwood. Susan Gehr, former apprentice and the language program’s Tribal Linguist, also attended. The Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival sent the trainers, Laura Grant of Tehachapi, and Kate Hedges of Redding. The Advocates are assisting the Karuk Tribe in achieving the training goals in their ANA project. The Yreka Tribal Housing Authority council chamber is directly connected through a serving counter to a fully-equipped kitchen. On Saturday morning, our cooks for the weekend, Kathy and Donna, passed a big breakfast of fried eggs, hash browns, toast, and fresh fruit through that window and continued to feed us abundantly for the next two days. Then Ruth asked Charlie Thom to open the workshop. After a minor misunderstanding about a request for a kiss, Charlie started our morning with a powerful prayer and song. We all introduced ourselves and then the master-apprentice teams talked a little about what they had been doing and what type of training they needed most. After that, Laura presented how to log and capture video segments from a miniDV tape using FinalCut Express, and how to label video files. All the teams had different levels of proficiency in capturing and editing so Laura and Kate worked with each apprentice individually so that each could take their own next step in video editing. Later in the afternoon, Eric Cutright, the Karuk Tribe’s IT director, reviewed the procedure for backing up the teams’ work on external hard drives. This is the first step in getting the recordings into the tribal archives. Ultimately, it was decided to use Super Duper to create cloned back ups for archive purposes, rather than the incremental back up generated by the Time Machine software. Everyone was busy all day including the master speakers who sat together often speaking in Karuk. It was impressive to see many of the young people easily join in the conversation. The great progress the Karuk Tribe has made in language revitalization was there for all to hear. During meal times family members joined us so they too enjoyed the language circles. On Sunday morning Laura, Ruth, and Susan led the group in a review of the naming conventions for files to be stored in the tribal archives and with which Susan will add language recordings to the online Karuk dictionary. We changed some conventions upon recommendations from the apprentices. Kate talked to us about making recordings at the highest quality and then compressing copies of the original files for presentations on iPods or the internet. Originally she was to give a presentation about how to create a podcast but Eric Cutright had notified us that the Karuk web site was not yet ready to receive them. Many wanted to share their recordings so instead we talked about how to use iDVD to make DVDs that could played on home media centers. Cris McAllister had already done a project like this so he led us through the process for creating DVDs. Laura shared an iDVD project she had made with several chapters about Kawaiisu traditional use of plants for medicine. Everyone continued to work on their individual projects through the morning and into Sunday afternoon. Many had questions about finding and organizing files in iTunes and iPhoto. Kate gave invaluable one-on-one instruction there and chaos on the apprentices’ laptops was greatly reduced. There were many conversations about the best way to archive media files. Itunes and iPhoto are good catalogers of media files. Each file can be saved in high-resolution format and then exported at a lower resolution or compressed file as needed. Within each program, the apprentices can organize their materials into selected subsets (playlists (iTunes) and albums (iPhoto)) for easy access. For the storage of media in general we discussed copying it to removable hard drives. This is handy if you are going to access source files to create multiple projects. External drives are machines so, in time, they will fail. It was also recommended to copy media to dual-layer DVDs. (Taiyo Yuden brand is high quality and our favorite.) These will hold over eight gigabytes (GB) of data. The software Toast, Version 10, will split larger files onto multiple discs that can later be reassembled into a single file. Though there was a wide spread in the apprentices’ proficiency in video editing and the use of a Macintosh computer, everyone left the workshop with skills a few notches higher than when they arrived. In a planning session at the close of the workshop, we agreed to meet again in Yreka for technical assistance on individual projects on February 20th. Crystal also would like to see more emphasis on training in immersion-style language learning to improve the apprentices’ ability to speak and to make the best use of the master speakers’ time during the three year ANA project. With a final helping of pumpkin pie and chocolate cake from Kathy and Donna, we said our farewells.
Interested in having trainings for your language program or organization, contact the Advocates atmarina@communityfuturescollective.org
Federal grant spurs program for tiny clients
In a classroom at a brand new Head Start building next to Margaret Keating Elementary School in Klamath, Yurok Tribe elder Ramona Stout sits face to face with 2-year-old Koreck Kuska.
Between them is a plastic toy with four barnyard animals hidden inside, waiting for Koreck to push a button or turn a switch to make their heads suddenly appear.
As Koreck uses his whole hand to press a small blue circle on the toy, a chicken pops its head out. Stout asks him to imitate the sound it would make.
"What does a chicken say?"
For a moment Koreck stalls, glancing first at the toy, then back at his companion before answering.
"Bawk?"
Sometimes when they play this game, Koreck summons a horse or cow from its hiding place, and instead of asking a question, Stout repeats the name of the animal in her native tongue for the boy to hear.
"Mues-mues," she says when the cow appears, and "mue-lah," when it's the horse.
Despite Stout's efforts, Koreck is technically here mostly for day care, not education. He's too young to be enrolled in the tribe's Head Start program that gives pre-school children the opportunity to learn the Yurok language. This will change in the coming months with the help of a $1,017,553 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Read more and see a photo at the link below, use your back button to return to this page:
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Report: Less than 50% of Native Americans graduate high school
I am sitting here in awe of new research coming out of UCLA that finds less than 50 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native students from the Pacific and Northwestern regions of the United States graduate high school.
I’ve been reporting on Indian education issues for about a decade now. We always knew the numbers were bad. But quantifiable data involving Indian populations is always hard to come by. This new data is just amazing.
The report, by the institution’s Civil Rights Project, is titled “The Dropout/Graduation Crisis among American Indians and Alaska Native Students: Failure to Respond Places the Future of Native People At Risk.”
Full story at: http://tinyurl.com/yduwekn
Report at: http://tinyurl.com/ydej3b8
American Indian and Alaska Native students can now apply for the Indian Health Service Scholarship Program. Eligible students can apply athttp://www.scholarship.ihs.gov/ . New applicants must submit an application by March 28 and continuing students must apply by Feb. 28.
Indian health programs need dedicated health and allied health professionals to fill staffing needs — people who envision a career with a purpose and mission, and who are willing to commit to working in Indian communities where they can truly make a difference. The mission of IHS is to raise the physical, mental, social and spiritual health of American Indians and Alaska Natives to the highest level. The IHS Scholarship Program gives many qualified health professionals the opportunity to pursue their careers and help their communities. The first IHS scholarship was awarded in 1977. Since then, millions of dollars have been awarded to American Indian and Alaska Native students to help them reach their career goals and dreams, while helping IHS to fulfill its mission: to raise the physical, mental, social and spiritual health of American Indians and Alaska Natives to the highest level. For more information, including eligibility requirements, download the IHS Application Handbook (http://www.scholarship.ihs.gov/handbooks/application_handbook.pdf )