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Two young Native boys were bragging about how fast their Fathers are. One stands tall and boasts, "My Dad is so fast that He can shoot a deer with an arrow and get to it before it drops to the ground!
The second boy says, "Wow that is fast", then says "Well my Dad works for the BIA and he's so fast that he gets off work at five and he's home at four thirty!"
From the Northern California Native Events & News:
Like so many rivers of the West, the Lower Klamath exhibits a legacy of destructive logging practices and is currently undergoing restoration. What sets this work apart is the lead role held by Native American tribes.
Besides federal and state agencies, the Yurok Tribe Fisheries Program is the largest fisheries management organization in California.
For hundreds if not thousands of years, tribes of the Klamath basin have been intrinsically linked to salmon, steelhead and the waterways that breed them.
Today, commercial harvesting of chinook salmon is an economic driver for the Yuroks, with tribal fishermen pulling in close to $3 million last season — sometimes making around $1,000 a day.
In order to sustain and improve this resource, the Yurok tribe has acquired and spent millions of dollars in grant funding to restore fisheries in the Lower Klamath.
The California Conference American Indian Education Program that includes the schedule and workshop descriptions can be downloaded here:
by Lou Mancinelli
If he went in search of a lifestyle completely different from the privileged one he experienced growing up in Chestnut Hill, with romanticized visions of Indian life swirling in his head, the reality of living for 13 years on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota has washed away those fancies as if they were sediment upon the looking glass.
But at the same time, it has transformed those idealistic visions into practical applications and revised perspectives. What Chestnut Hill native and 1996 Chestnut Hill Academy graduate Peter Hill, 34, discovered is a people still fighting to rise from the unspeakable atrocities committed against them by the U.S. government.
As a teenager, Hill visited the Pine Ridge Reservation during a series of summer work trips organized by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the Episcopal church his family attended regularly.
And after Peter graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota in 2000 with a B.A. in Native American Studies, he moved to the Pine Ridge Reservation through an international teachers’ program. He has lived there ever since, working as a history and language teacher at the reservation’s high school, Red Cloud Indian School.
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From Norther California Native Events & News
Bloomfield Book Award Winner Selected
"The Linguistic Society of America will present the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award to California Indian Languages, by Victor Golla (University of California Press, 2011). California Indian Languages is a remarkable piece of documentary linguistics, achieving its goal "to be the reference of first resort" on the indigenous languages of California for both neophytes and experts. This work extensively documents the remarkable unity and diversity found in the languages of California."<http://www.linguisticsociety.org/news/2012/12/04/bloomfield-book-award-winner-selected>"Nowhere was the linguistic diversity of the New World more extreme than in California, where an extraordinary variety of village-dwelling peoples spoke seventy-eight mutually unintelligible languages. This comprehensive illustrated handbook, a major synthesis of more than 150 years of documentation and study, reviews what we now know about California's indigenous languages."For more information on the book see:0 0 1 1125 6414 NCIDC 53 15 7524 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE
A medicine garden
A few herbalists keep alive ancient knowledge of plants
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Robin Chenoweth
FOR THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
The town drunk likely earned his nickname by panhandling small change to buy his next bottle of hooch. Everyone knew Fifty-Cent Freddie was dancing a two-step with death. But something compelled him to go to the herbal healer who lived in the mountains overlooking Bluefield, W.Va.
Seeing her grandmother treat Freddie with valerian root and skullcap jostled something in young Sarah Brown’s consciousness.
"I remember that so clearly," said Brown, who lives in the Hilltop area. "She helped him come off alcohol because it was killing him. Anybody who came, my grandmother helped."
Even as a child who ran barefoot and worry-free through the hills, Brown was marked to pass down a tradition of healing that predates recorded civilization.
The roots of that tradition, grafted from ancient African and American Indian cultures, grow deep in Brown’s garden.
"You are born and die an herbalist," Brown said. "It’s a continuous study. . . . It takes years to master."
Plants such as Saint-John’s-wort, plantain, comfrey and lemon balm nestle in Brown’s tightly planted beds. She picks the herbs and brews them or makes them into salves, just as her grandmother did.
Others taught her grandmother the herbal way, and before them were others.
Some consider the tradition lost, except that it isn’t: More than 80 percent of the world uses medicinal plants to heal and maintain health, said James Duke, an ethnobotanist who has studied plants throughout the world.
"Man has been experimenting with herbs as long as man has been here," Duke said. "There have been people in India and China for 1 million years and (people) in Africa for 8 million years.
"The longer they’ve had to evolve with these (plants), the better their genes recognize them. . . . We’ve had less than 200 years with synthetic medicine."
Many modern drugs, in fact, are derived from medicinal plants or are modeled biochemically after them.
The indigenous plant black cohosh, for example, is used to treat menopause in the prescription drug Remifemin; compounds from rosy periwinkle help cure 90 percent of childhood leukemia.
But much of nature’s medicine chest remains untapped.
Most drug trials on herbs are conducted in Europe. In the United States, herbalists are barred from diagnosing illness or prescribing herbs. And many doctors are skeptical of their claims.
"The cautionary push-back for most physicians is that our market for herbs and dietary supplements is horribly under-, said Dr. Brent - Bauer, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Complementary and Integrated Medicine Program.
The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 made manufacturers responsible for ensuring the safety of their products. Since then, variations in the quality of herbs have been huge from brand to brand, he said.
"I can basically go out in my backyard, squeeze up some grass clippings, call it Dr. Bauer’s Miracle Prostate Cure and pretty much go to the market," he said.
A few supplements, such as ephedra, have been pulled off the market by the Food and Drug Administration because studies indicate health threats. (FDA officials were contacted several times regarding this story but declined to be interviewed.)
The validity of such studies often are hotly debated by people such as Duke, who believes herbal treatments are safer, cheaper and more effective than their synthetic counterparts. He maintains that each year synthetic drugs, taken as prescribed in a hospital setting, kill at least 140,000 Americans.
Duke, who retired from the U.S. Department of Agriculture after 30 years of tracking down medicinal plants, is fighting to have synthetic drugs tested against herbal alternatives.
Indeed, the tide might be shifting as medical institutions conduct more studies on herbs. The Mayo Clinic is studying how valerian — the same herb Brown’s grandmother used — affects fatigue in cancer patients. The University of Illinois is running drug trials on black cohosh and red clover. Other government-funded studies are under way.
"But it’s a difficult area," said Dr. Norman Farnsworth, a pharmaceutical researcher at the University of Illinois. "Some of the government-sponsored trials have failed" because plant extracts, which vary greatly from batch to batch, have not been correctly standardized.
Nevertheless, health-care professionals must consider alternative medicines in their many forms, said Bauer, because 60 percent of people are using them.
"If the majority have this as part of their health-care program, it’s not an alternative anymore. So we absolutely have to be a lot more savvy."
Meanwhile, Brown and other herbalists continue to bear a stigma.
"The bane of my existence is being the ‘voodoo queen,’ especially being black and an herbalist," she said.
"If I could just get past that image. This is not a carnival. This is very serious stuff . . . because we’re trying to help the way we’ve been helped."
Brown has pored over botanical texts and studied herbal guides published by Commission E, an arm of Germany’s federal drug agency.
But her grandmother began Brown’s lessons simply, as she had learned them, with herbs that grew in the woods surrounding their home.
"(She) said, ‘You’re going to become an expert at 10 herbs in front of you,’ " Brown recalled, plants such as dandelion root, red clover and goldenrod.
"If you had a cold, you’d go out there and get comfrey, mullein, yarrow — your wayside weeds."
Because they were poor and lived in an area accessible only by steep dirt roads, herbs often were the only treatment available. In her grandmother’s day, blacks were barred from white hospitals. So they continued the traditional healing that their ancestors brought over on slave ships.
"There was more than hair underneath the scarves that the slave women wore," Brown said. "They had herbs and roots and things to help heal people."
The West Virginia mountains also harbored many eastern Cherokee Indians, who fled there to escape going west on the Trail of Tears.
The escapees survived by marrying whites and blacks, and they passed on Indian medicine. That blending of herbal lore is prevalent throughout the world, Duke said.
"Whenever cultures mix, their herbal traditions get mixed," he said.
One of Brown’s favorite herbs, plantain, was called White Man’s Footsteps by Native Americans because it spread wherever white explorers went.
Shamans and healers worldwide made good use of plantain, which has been clinically proven to treat certain eye, throat and mouth infections. It is also a proven diuretic, which is no surprise to Brown, who has seen the herb cure kidney ailments.
"It’s so frustrating being an herbalist," she said. "We know these things work; it’s just hard trying to convince people.
"Herbalism is folk art, oldwives’ tales passed down, it’s true. But right now it is being scientifically proven."
She frets about the health of the 20 percent of Americans who can’t afford drugs or doctors to prescribe them.
"Herbs are the medicines of everyday man," she said. "You have choices. You can go ahead and suffer, or you might want to, for example, take some tea from this leaf."
Standing among her plants, she crushed some thyme and smelled its fragrance.
"Since the beginning of time, this information has been passed; we have just gotten away from it," she said.
"A lot of people are destroyed by a lack of knowledge."
Yellowknife, NWT - March means it is time to celebrate aboriginal languages month once again.
Its purpose is to raise awareness and celebrate the importance of keeping aboriginal languages alive.
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Dr. Michelle Keeter
Keeter is from Smith River, Calif., and is a descendant of the Tolowa and Karuk Native American tribes from that area. She earned a medical degree from Loma Linda School of Medicine and worked as a medical assistant before medical school.She chose to train in Hanford because she likes to work in rural areas similar to her hometown. As a child, she said she was always interested in the human body and how it works."Becoming a physician allowed me to use that knowledge to better people's lives and take care of them," she said.To read the rest of the article please see:The CBS Show Mike & Molly made the "joke" that Arizona is full of Drunk Indians. Contact CBS Here: http://www.cbs.com/info/ user_services/ fb_global_form.php
The Navajo Nation is Livid after a joke aired on "Mike & Molly" ... calling Native Americans a bunch of drunks ... and now the group is demanding an apology from CBS.In case you missed it, Mike's mother on the show -- an Archie Bunker type -- says, "Arizona? Why would I move to Arizona? It's nothing but a furnace full of drunk Indians."The joke isn't sitting well in the Native American community. A rep for the Navajo Nation tells TMZ, » http://www.imdb.com/news/ni48231045/
My note to CBS: It is 2013 I cannot believe the show Mike and Molly was allowed or even considered making the joke that Arizona is full of drunk Indians. Would you say that Compton was full of House Negros or that West Virginia full of people committing incest. Wake up and join the 21st Century.