The League of Iowa Human & Civil Rights Agencies

Suicide Raises Legal Issues in Indian Artifacts Cases

By Kirk Johnson, New York Times

Published: March 8, 2010

SALT LAKE CITY — Every person’s life is a mix of the things revealed and unrevealed, secrets spilled or kept. Ted Gardiner, who committed suicide last week, was no exception. “He had a lot of demons,”...

SELLS, Ariz. — An eerie hush settles in at sundown on the Tohono O’odham Nation, which straddles 75 miles of border with Mexico. Few residents leave their homes. The roads crawl with the trucks of Border Patrol agents, who stop unfamiliar vehicles, scrutinize back roads for footprints and hike into the desert wilds to intercept smugglers carrying marijuana on their backs and droves of migrants trying to make it north. By the bad luck of geography, the only large Indian reservation...

A state lawmaker who is one-quarter Comanche wants high schools with American Indian mascots to get approval from a state board. Sen. Suzanne Williams, D-Aurora, said one concern is mascots that portray Native Americans as caricatures, “with a funny nose or something.” She praised Arapahoe High School’s handling of its mascot, the Warriors, and said she would like to see other schools follow suit. But another lawmaker said her proposal is a “pathetic attempt to circumv...

After more than a century of obstruction and delays, still another deadline looms for a settlement that would compensate hundreds of thousands of American Indians for billions of dollars lost by a government that failed miserably to manage tribal lands that had been entrusted to it. A law passed in 1887 conveyed the land in trust to the federal government. The government-controlled trust accounts were mishandled and lost, cheating the Indian owners out of fees from grazing livestock and ...

Earlier this week, DiversityInc received complaints from some American Indian readers because of our video interview with Margot Copeland, executive vice president and director, Corporate Diversity and Philanthropy at KeyBank, No. 50 on The 2009 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity® list. In the video, discussing the bank’s efforts at financial literacy for traditionally underrepresented communities, she stated: "We have initiatives around the Native American community. Many...

More than 200 years late — 31 if you count from the tribe’s petition — the federal government has acknowledged that the Shinnecocks of Southampton, Long Island, are an Indian tribe. Settling that question raises new ones. The Shinnecocks will almost certainly try to build a casino — they have been lobbying as hard for one as they have for recognition — but how big, and where? The “where” is an especially interesting question. Casinos are usually built...

SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — As Shinnecock Indians returned to their reservation on Long Island after World War II, elders warned that their tribe’s long struggle for survival was once again threatened.  Decent jobs were scarce and many Shinnecock veterans were leaving, draining the reservation of needed hands.  “The older men said, ‘If all of you young men move away, who is going to be here to carry on the work of the reservation and our traditions?’ ” re...

PINE RIDGE, S.D. — Richard Wilson has been a pallbearer for at least five of his “homeboys” in the North Side Tre Tre Gangster Crips, a Sioux imitation of a notorious Denver gang. One 15-year-old member was mauled by rivals. A 17-year-old shot himself; another, on a cocaine binge and firing wildly, was shot by the police. One died in a drunken car wreck, and another, a founder of the gang named Gaylord, was stabbed to death at 27.

“We all got drunk ...

By MIKE STOBBE

The Associated Press

Thursday, December 10, 2009; 12:35 PM

ATLANTA -- Health officials say American Indians and Alaska Natives have died from swine flu at a rate four times greater than other Americans. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday released a study of swine flu deaths in 12 states. They found that 42 American Indians and Alaska Natives in those states died of swine flu or its complications. That was a rate of nearly...

GRAND FORKS, N.D. — Sometime soon, the Fighting Sioux of the University of North Dakota were to be no more, another collegiate nickname dropped after being deemed hostile and abusive to American Indians. Except that some members of the Spirit Lake Tribe, one of two groups of Sioux in the state, say they consider the nickname an honor and worry that abandoning it would send them one step closer to obscurity.

“When you hear them announce the name at the start of a...