Indian Tribes Go in Search of Their Lost Languages - NYTimes.com

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By PATRICIA COHEN

As far as the records show, no one has spoken Shinnecock or Unkechaug, languages of Long Island’s Indian tribes, for nearly 200 years. Now Stony Brook University and two of the Indian nations are initiating a joint project to revive these extinct tongues, using old documents like a vocabulary list that Thomas Jefferson wrote during a visit in 1791.

The goal is language resuscitation and enlisting tribal members from this generation and the next to speak them, said representatives from the tribes and Stony Brook’s Southampton campus.

Chief Harry Wallace, the elected leader of the Unkechaug Nation, said that for tribal members, knowing the language is an integral part of understanding their own culture, past and present.

“When our children study their own language and culture, they perform better academically,” he said. “They have a core foundation to rely on.”

The Long Island effort is part of a wave of language reclamation projects undertaken by American Indians in recent years. For many tribes language is a cultural glue that holds a community together, linking generations and preserving a heritage and values. Bruce Cole, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which sponsors language preservation programs, has called language “the DNA of a culture.”

The odds against success can be overwhelming, given the relatively small number of potential speakers and the difficulty in persuading a new generation to participate. There has been progress, though, said Leanne Hinton, professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, who created the Breath of Life program in California in 1992 to revive dormant languages in the state.

Representatives from at least 25 languages with no native speakers have participated in the group’s workshops so far, she said. Last month Ms. Hinton and a colleague at Yale received a federal grant to create a similar program based in Washington, D.C.

Of the more than 300 indigenous languages spoken in the United States, only 175 remain, according to the Indigenous Language Institute. This nonprofit group estimates that without restoration efforts, no more than 20 will still be spoken in 2050.

Some reclamation efforts have shown success. Daryl Baldwin started working to revive the dormant language of the Miami Nation in the Midwest (part of the Algonquian language family), and taught his own children to speak it fluently. He now directs the Myaamia Project at Miami University in Ohio, a joint effort between academics and the Miami tribe.

Farther east is Stephanie Fielding, a member of the Connecticut Mohegans and an adviser on the Stony Brook project. She has devoted her life to bringing her tribe’s language back to life and is compiling a dictionary and grammar book. In her eyes language provides a mental telescope into the world of her ancestors. She notes, for example, that in an English conversation, a statement is typically built with the first person — “I” — coming first. In the same statement in Mohegan, however, “you” always comes first, even when the speaker is the subject.

“This suggests a more communally minded culture,” she said.

Now in her 60s, Ms. Fielding knows firsthand just how tough it is to sustain a language effort over time, however. She said she was still not fluent.

“In order for a language to survive and resurrect,” she said, “it needs people talking it, and for people to talk it, there has to be a society that works on it.”

Chief Wallace of the Unkechaug in Long Island already has a willing student from a younger generation. Howard Treadwell, 24, graduated from Stony Brook in 2009 with a linguistics degree. He will participate in the Long Island effort while doing graduate work at the University of Arizona, where there is a specialized program researching American Indian languages.

Mr. Treadwell is one of 400 registered members of the tribe, which maintains a 52-acre reservation in Mastic, on the South Shore. The Shinnecocks have about 1,300 enrolled members and have a reservation adjacent to Southampton.

Robert D. Hoberman, the chairman of the linguistics department at Stony Book, is overseeing the academic side of the project. He is an expert in the creation of modern Hebrew, the great success story of language revival. Essentially unspoken for 2,000 years, Hebrew survived only in religious uses until early Zionists tried to update it — an undertaking adopted on a grand scale when the State of Israel was established.

For the American Indians on Long Island the task is particularly difficult because there are few records. But Shinnecock and Unkechaug are part of a family of eastern Algonquian languages. Some have both dictionaries and native speakers, Mr. Hoberman said, which the team can mine for missing words and phrases, and for grammatical structure.

The reclamation is a two-step process, the professor explained. “First we have to figure out what the language looked like,” using remembered prayers, greetings, sayings and word lists, like the one Jefferson created, he said. “Then we’ll look at languages that are much better documented, look at short word lists to see what the differences are and see what the equivalencies are, and we’ll use that to reconstruct what the Long Island languages probably were like.” The Massachusett language, for example, is well documented with dictionaries and Bible translations.

Jefferson’s Unkechaug word list was collected on June 13, 1791, when he visited Brookhaven, Long Island, with James Madison, later his successor in the White House. He wrote that even then, only three old women remained who could still speak the language fluently.

Chief Wallace said he had many more records, including religious documents, deeds and legal transactions, and possibly a tape of some tribal members speaking in the 1940s.

“When we have an idea of what the language should sound like, the vocabulary and the structure, we’ll then introduce it to people in the community,” Mr. Hoberman said.

While it may seem impossible to recreate the sound of a lost tongue, Mr. Hoberman said the process was not all that mysterious because the dictionaries were transliterated into English.

“Would someone from 200 years ago think we had a funny accent?” Mr. Hoberman asked. “Yes. Would they understand it? I hope so.”

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American Indians Hit Hard By Swine Flu

December 25, 2009 from APR

Although H1N1 has proven less deadly than originally anticipated, it has taken a serious toll on American Indians.

According to a recent report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the mortality rate from the virus is four times higher among American Indians and Alaska Natives than any other racial or ethnic group.

Phil Stago and his family were hit particularly hard by the virus.

Nationwide Reports Of Flu-Like Illness

Map: Nationwide Reports Of Flu-Like Illness

They live in a tiny house in the tiny town of Winslow, Ariz., just outside the vast Navajo Nation. On a recent morning, his 2-year-old watched cartoons and snuggled with her dad. The baby rocked in a swing.

The mellow day was quite a switch from the drama the household experienced in September, when Stago says swine flu wiped out his family for a whole month.

Stago's son got it first — itchy throat, fever and aches. Then 2-year-old Alicia picked up the virus. She’s feeling much better now, but when her newborn sister, Gabriela, caught swine flu, things got scary.

Stago took her to an Indian Health Service hospital nearby when her fever hit 100 degrees.

"They secluded us from her, and they put her in a little tent of oxygen," Stago says. "[We] had to wear the whole full isolation gowns and gloves and mask. That was pretty scary."

Indigenous People More Vulnerable

When patients require more intensive care than Gabriela did, they're sent to Flagstaff Medical Center, about an hour west of Winslow.

One day during the peak of the second wave of the swine flu virus, the intensive care unit was almost full of American Indians on respiratory ventilators.

The scene reflects a statewide trend. In Arizona, of the more than 1,500 people who have been hospitalized for swine flu, 13 percent have been American Indian. Yet American Indians make up only 5 percent of Arizonans.

Aboriginal Australians and First Nations groups in Canada have reported similar disproportionate findings.

There are plenty of theories as to why indigenous people are more at risk. John Redd, an epidemiologist for the Indian Health Service, says that crowding and poor housing, both risk factors for influenza, are more present in indigenous populations around the world.

In addition to poverty, Redd also points out that American Indians are prone to diabetes and asthma. When you combine swine flu with these pre-existing conditions, the outcomes are worse.

Access to health care is also an issue. There are a dozen Indian health care centers scattered throughout the Navajo Nation, but the reservation is the size of West Virginia.

Cindy Galloway, who works at a family health center that serves American Indians in the Flagstaff area, believes there are other factors contributing to the higher mortality rates.

"They are more stoic people. They don't complain, frankly," Galloway says.

She says it's typical for American Indian patients to wait until their symptoms become severe before they seek treatment.

"People will tolerate feeling bad longer and thinking it's going to go away," Galloway says. "When finally after four or five days they can't even take a deep breath, then they realize that this could be more serious."

Indian Health Service officials say many people have been exposed to swine flu or have been vaccinated now, so there's hope that the next possible wave of the virus, which could come as early as January, won’t be as severe.

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Census Goes Off the Rez to Count American Indians

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LOS ANGELES-- When United American Indian Involvement, Inc., opened its doors in 1974 on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, it was a modest shelter serving downtown’s American Indian community. Today it occupies a larger facility, has centers in Fresno and Bakersfield, and provides an array of social services.

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UAII’s growth reflects the explosive surge in American Indians moving from tribal reservations to urban centers, like Los Angeles County. According to U.S. Census data, more than 90 percent of the state’s American Indian population now lives off tribal reservations. That demographic shift requires targeted strategies by the Census Bureau in getting an accurate count of American Indians in the upcoming 2010 census count.

“We’re looking at a huge challenge, due to the federal policies of relocation of our people over the years, and then just the outright economic conditions that were present and are still present, causing people to go off the reservation for work, to make a living,” said Tim Harjo, the American Indian partnership specialist for the U.S. Census Bureau in Los Angeles. “And then they get to these places [like Los Angeles], and it’s not easy. They find themselves in bad situations.”

Harjo’s job is to encourage participation in the 2010 Census by more than 300,000 American Indians in his region, which includes Southern California and Hawaii.

While Harjo and his colleagues have been outreaching directly to tribal governments across California, he says the tougher test in 2010 will be to count the American Indian majority who are increasingly leaving the reservations and moving into the urban areas. They are most likely not members of local or regional tribes but in fact may have migrated from elsewhere in the state or country.

According to 2000 Census data, more than 90 percent of California’s American Indian population now lives off tribal reservations. In fact, the bureau’s most recent population estimates show there are now more than 155,000 American Indian and Alaska Natives residing in Los Angeles county alone, making it the most populous county in the nation for that racial category.

Placed in historical context, the numbers are extraordinary.

When the federal government first recognized American Indians on the 1860 census, their official population nationwide stood at roughly 44,000. By 1950, they numbered 343,000, and in the 2000 census, the American Indian population was 4 million. It is a trend that the bureau expects to continue. By 2050, the nation’s native population could surpass 8.6 million, or 2 percent of the U.S. population.

“To some people those numbers may not seem like a lot, but it is huge for us,” said [explained] Harjo.

Which is why community organizations like UAII are paying close attention to the 2010 Census and becoming active participants in spreading the message of being counted to community members.

“We’ve already sent out fliers [encouraging census participation] to thousands of names on our mailing list,” said Jerimy Billy, associate director of UAII. “We took it upon ourselves to promote it using our own funds because we want to see an accurate count.”

Many UAII programs are funded through government contracts. And with an annual $400 billion in federal allocations based on 2010 Census numbers, UAII and other organizations have a vested interest in making sure their communities get a fair share of that funding.

“The census does play a part, because it allows us to have a number to work with,” said Billy. “Our funders want to get the most bang for their buck. They want to give where they think we can serve the most. And without that concrete data, it’s really hard to convince them we have a large population.”

Changing public perceptions of where American Indians reside, explained Billy, will be helpful for both funders and tribal governments alike in the years to come.

“Sometimes what happens is, people from the reservation come through LA, and they may need to access our health services, but the people from those other tribes or reservations may not really be aware of what we do,” he said. “They might say, ‘Well, urban organizations are serving non-Indians.’ No. For example, there is a huge Lakota population living in LA. Or we can go back to the Navajo tribe and say, ‘We’ve got a huge population here that we’re trying to serve.’”

Specifying tribal affiliation on the 2010 Census questionnaire will have huge ramifications for American Indian communities because there is a direct correlation between how many people identify with a particular tribe and how much money that tribe receives from the government for services.

Harjo points to tribal numbers from the 2000 census as proof that American Indians lost out on funding for their communities 10 years ago.

Of the 4.1 million American Indian and Alaskan Natives identified on the 2000 census, the tribal affiliations of over 1 million were “not specified.” While lack of education on how to fill out the form is part of the problem, Harjo says there are also structural problems with the census questionnaire that led to the missing information.

“Question number 9 [on the census questionnaire] is the race question, and that’s the biggest issue,” he said. “There are only 19 boxes to write in the name of your tribe. But many tribe names require more than 19 boxes. And then there are people who write-in their tribe, but it’s a traditional name that the data processors don’t recognize, so that doesn’t get counted. That’s a lot of money that was lost.”

In California, there are over 100 federally recognized tribal groups, as well as dozens of smaller tribes that are still unrecognized by the government.

Further complicating the census outreach efforts of organizations like UAII and census officials like Harjo, are deep-seated – and well-founded - feelings of distrust toward government.

“Confidentiality is always a big concern,” said Harjo, “but perhaps more so, there are quite simply a lot of people who are saying, ‘it doesn’t matter to me.’”

Between now and National Census Day on April 1, Harjo and his allies in the Los Angeles region will be putting their all into making sure the growing community of urban American Indians understand that it does matter.

“We don’t have the resources to get out and be everywhere,” said Billy. “Our staff is still not big enough to meet everybody’s needs. At least to capture that, and show there is a need… I think that’s the most important thing.”

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Gang Violence Grows on an Indian Reservation

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By ERIK ECKHOLM

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 after Gaylord’s burial, and I started rapping,” said Mr. Wilson, who, at 24, is practically a gang elder. “But I teared up and couldn’t finish.”

Mr. Wilson is one of 5,000 young men from the Oglala Sioux tribe involved with at least 39 gangs on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The gangs are being blamed for an increase in vandalism, theft, violence and fear that is altering the texture of life here and in other parts of American Indian territory.

This stunning land of crumpled prairie, horse pastures turned tawny in the autumn and sunflower farms is marred by an astonishing number of roadside crosses and gang tags sprayed on houses, stores and abandoned buildings, giving rural Indian communities an inner-city look.

Groups like Wild Boyz, TBZ, Nomads and Indian Mafia draw children from broken, alcohol-ravaged homes, like Mr. Wilson’s, offering brotherhood, an identity drawn from urban gangsta rap and self-protection.

Some groups have more than a hundred members, others just a couple of dozen. Compared with their urban models, they are more likely to fight rivals, usually over some minor slight, with fists or clubs than with semiautomatic pistols.

Mr. Wilson, an unemployed school dropout who lives with assorted siblings and partners in his mother’s ramshackle house, without running water, displayed a scar on his nose and one over his eye. “It’s just like living in a ghetto,” he said. “Someone’s getting beat up every other night.”

The Justice Department distinguishes the home-grown gangs on reservations from the organized drug gangs of urban areas, calling them part of an overall juvenile crime problem in Indian country that is abetted by eroding law enforcement, a paucity of juvenile programs and a suicide rate for Indian youth that is more than three times the national average.

If they lack the reach of the larger gangs after which they style themselves, the Indian gangs have emerged as one more destructive force in some of the country’s poorest and most neglected places.

While many crimes go unreported, the police on the Pine Ridge reservation have documented thousands of gang-related thefts, assaults — including sexual assaults — and rising property crime over the last three years, along with four murders. Residents are increasingly fearful that their homes will be burglarized or vandalized. Car windows are routinely smashed out.

“Tenants are calling in and saying ‘I’m scared,’ ” Paul Iron Cloud, executive officer of the Oglala Sioux (Lakota) Housing Authority, told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in July at a special hearing on the increase of gang activity.

“It seems that every day we’re getting more violence,” Mr. Iron Cloud said.

Perhaps unique to reservations, rivals sometimes pelt one other with cans of food from the federal commodity program, a practice called “commod-squadding.”

As federal grants to Pine Ridge have declined over the last decade, the tribal police force has shrunk by more than half, with only 12 to 20 officers per shift patrolling an area the size of Rhode Island, said John Mousseau, chairman of the tribe’s judiciary committee.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has proposed large increases in money for the police, courts and juvenile programs, and for fighting rampant domestic and sexual violence on reservations.

Christopher M. Grant, who used to head a police antigang unit in Rapid City, S.D., and is now a consultant on gangs to several tribes and federal agencies, has noted the “marked increase in gang activity, particularly on reservations in the Midwest, the Northwest and the Southwest” over the last five to seven years.

The Navajo Nation in Arizona, for example, has identified 225 gang units, up from 75 in 1997.

One group that reaches across reservations in Minnesota, called the Native Mob, is more like the street gangs seen in cities, with hierarchical leadership and involvement in drug and weapons trafficking, Mr. Grant said.

Many of the gangs in Pine Ridge, like the Tre Tre Crips, were started by tribal members who encountered them in prison or while living off the reservation; others have taken their names and colors from movies and records.

Even as they seek to bolster policing, Pine Ridge leaders see their best long-term hope for fighting gangs in cultural revival.

“We’re trying to give an identity back to our youth,” said Melvyn Young Bear, the tribe’s appointed cultural liaison. “They’re into the subculture of African-Americans and Latinos. But they are Lakota, and they have a lot to be proud of.”

Mr. Young Bear, 42, is charged with promoting Lakota rituals, including drumming, chanting and sun dances. He noted that some Head Start programs were now conducted entirely in Lakota.

Michael Little Boy Jr., 30, of the village of Evergreen, said he had initially been tempted by gang life, but with rituals and purifying sweat lodges, “I was able to turn myself around.” He is emerging as a tribal spiritual leader, working with youth groups to promote native traditions.

Mr. Grant said a survey of young men in South Dakota reservations found that the approach might be helping.

Mr. Wilson, the 24-year-old gang member, said he regretted not learning the Sioux language when he was young and now wondered about his own future.

“I still get drunk and hang with my homeboys, but not like I used to,” he said.

His car, its windows shattered, sits outside his house, so he cannot get to the G.E.D. class he says he would like to attend. His goal is to run a recording studio where his younger half-brother, Richard Lame, 18, could make rap songs. Mr. Lame is finishing high school and says he wants to go to college.

But he admits that he still joined 30 or so homeboys in town to party any chance he got — “for the rush, the thrill.” As he spoke, he was dressed in the dark colors of his set, the Black Wall Street Boyz; his tiny bedroom was decorated with movie posters of Al Pacino as the megalomaniacal drug dealer Tony Montana in “Scarface,” and he wore a black bandanna.

He pulled out a thick sheaf of his rap lyrics and gave an impromptu performance.

Ever since birth

I been waitin’ for death ...

Government to settle suit over Indian land trusts

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ACCOUNTING MISMANAGED
$1.4 billion in payments to end 13-year-old battle

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 9, 2009

The Obama administration said Tuesday it would pay $1.4 billion to a group of American Indians who said the government mismanaged a century-old system of Indian land trusts.

The settlement, which would end one of the epic lawsuits of modern Washington, would be divided among more than 300,000 people, the descendants of Indians to whom the government assigned plots of tribal land under an 1887 law. Many of the plots are controlled by hundreds or even thousands of heirs, and a federal system designed to track claims and distribute revenue generated by the parcels has broken down.

The administration said it would spend $2 billion in addition to the payouts to try to buy back sole ownership of the many plots, one tiny fraction at a time.

The deal, announced by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., would end a lawsuit that has lasted 13 years, coloring the relationship between federal and tribal governments with a bitter reminder of the Indian wars. Officials said they intended the settlement to create trust between Washington and "Indian country."

"We are here today to right a past wrong," Salazar said. Of the plaintiffs the government had battled so long, he said: "They [brought] a national injustice to the attention of our country."

This suit might be best known as the case that took the Interior Department off e-mail: In 2001, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth determined that the Indian trust accounts were vulnerable to hackers and issued an order that caused the department to sever connections to the Internet.

But its origins go back to the administration of President Grover Cleveland, when Congress passed a law allotting individual tribe members parcels of 40 to 160 acres, to be held in trust by the government for 25 years. In most cases, the land never left government hands.

Today, the Interior Department manages more than 100,000 parcels, totaling more than 56 million acres. When these lands are used for grazing, mining or drilling for oil or natural gas, the revenue is supposed to be split among its owners. But the system quickly devolved into an accounting mess. The number of owners multiplied, since many Indians died without wills and their children inherited equal ownership fractions. The parcels are split 4 million ways.

To make things worse, government records for tracking them were kept in poorly maintained warehouses, where some were destroyed by fires, floods or insects. Owners complained that they were being paid irregularly, improperly or not at all.

In 1996, they filed suit. Since then, officials said, the case has encompassed dozens of hearings, 192 days of trial proceedings and multiple appeals to higher courts. And two different judges: In 2006, an appeals court removed Lamberth from the case after finding that he appeared to be biased against the Interior Department.

The settlement announced Tuesday must be voted on by Congress and approved by the new judge, James Robertson. At a ceremony honoring Robertson on Tuesday, Lamberth praised his handling of the case and said this was "a great day for Americans and for all Native Americans."

Under its terms, officials said, most Indian shareholders would get a check for $1,000. Some could get more, however, if the judge decides they lost more money because of federal mismanagement. Some of the $1.4 billion will also be used to pay attorneys' fees.

The plaintiffs had asked for many more billions. But Elouise Cobell, the lead plaintiff and a resident of the Blackfeet reservation in Montana, said her side did not want the case to drag on further.

"This is significantly less than the full accounting to which individual Indians are entitled," Cobell said at the news conference. "We are compelled to settle now by the sobering realization that our class grows smaller" as older members have died, she said.

In addition, the settlement would use $2 billion to begin buying back 37,000 of the most heavily subdivided parcels of land, so that the federal government would be the sole owner.

David Hayes, a deputy secretary of the Interior, said that the newly bought land would be owned by the federal government but that individual tribes would be able to decide what to do with it. Hayes said the government did not want to give up the land, fearing it might allow non-Indians to buy parcels on reservations.

An official for the National Congress of American Indians said the divided ownership has made it difficult for tribal governments to build schools or health clinics because it was difficult to convince a majority of the owners to agree.

"We had kids going to school in double-wide trailer houses, that were running from double-wide to double-wide when it was 40 below zero," said Richard Monette, the former chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, whose reservation is in North Dakota. "We got money for a school, but we didn't have a place to put it" because the land was shared among so many owners, he said.

Staff writer Carol Leonnig contributed to this report.

Sex Trafficking of American Indians in Minnesota

The Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center (MIWRC) of Minneapolis, MN has released its ground breaking report on the scope of sex trafficking of American Indians in Minnesota entitled Shattered Hearts: the commercial sexual exploitation of American Indian women and girls in Minnesota. This report is believed to be the first of its kind in the country to analyze the victimization rate for Native females in our state.

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New Hopes on Health Care for American Indians

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By PAM BELLUCK

The meeting last month was a watershed: the leaders of 564 American Indian tribes were invited to Washington to talk with cabinet members and President Obama, who called it “the largest and most widely attended gathering of tribal leaders in our history.”
Topping the list of their needs was better health care.
“Native Americans die of illnesses like tuberculosis, alcoholism, diabetes, pneumonia and influenza at far higher rates,” Mr. Obama said. “We’re going to have to do more to address disparities in health care delivery.”
The health care overhaul now being debated in Congress appears poised to bring the most significant improvements to the Indian health system in decades. After months of negotiations, provisions under consideration could, over time, direct streams of money to the Indian health care system and give Indians more treatment options.
Some proposals, like exempting Indians from penalties for not obtaining insurance, may meet resistance from lawmakers opposed to expanding benefits for Indians, many of whom receive free medical care.
But advocates say the changes recognize Indians’ unique status and could ease what Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, calls “full-scale health care rationing going on on Indian reservations.”
“We’ve got the ‘first Americans’ living in third world conditions,” Mr. Dorgan said.
Mr. Obama has emphasized Indian issues more than most presidents. He campaigned on reservations, created a senior policy adviser for Native American affairs and appointed Kimberly Teehee, a Cherokee, to the post, and gave Indians other high-ranking positions.
He has proposed a budget increase of 13 percent for the federal Indian Health Service, which provides free care to 1.9 million Indians who belong to federally recognized tribes, most of whom live on tribally owned land. The service, which had a budget this year of $3.3 billion, has also received $500 million in stimulus money for construction, repairs and equipment.
“This new administration has been much more positive,” said W. Ron Allen, chairman of the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe in Washington State and treasurer of the National Congress of American Indians, adding that the Congressional proposals provide “a very impressive opportunity to close the gap in Indian health care.”
On Thursday, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee is scheduled to discuss other Indian health issues that could end up in the overhaul bill.
Indians could benefit from broader overhaul programs for low-income and uninsured citizens, but they do not want to relinquish the health care they claim as a historical right.
“Indian people have given up a lot,” said Dr. Yvette Roubideaux, director of the Indian Health Service. “They really feel like they have, in a sense, prepaid for this health care with loss of land, natural resources, loss of culture.”
‘List Goes On and On’
In the vast, varied territory called Indian Country, health care is stung with struggle.
Too few doctors. Too little equipment. Hospitals and clinics miles of hardscrabble road away.
In cities, where over half of the country’s roughly 3 million Indians now live (and nearly 5 million including part-Indians), only 34 programs get Indian Health Service funding, providing mostly basic care and arranging more advanced care and coverage elsewhere.
While some Indians have private insurance, often through employers or tribal businesses like casinos, a third are uninsured and a quarter live in poverty. By all accounts, the Indian Health Service is substantially underfunded.
Money shortages, bureaucracy and distance can delay treatment of even serious conditions for months, even years.
Many Indians face multiple roadblocks.
Joanna Quotskuyva’s breast cancer did not require a mastectomy, but she chose to have surgery because radiation would mean months of driving five hours round-trip from her home on the Hopi reservation in Kykotsmovi, Ariz.
Many make similar choices, because “unfortunately, we don’t have the capability,” said Dr. Joachim Chino, chief of surgery at the nearest hospital, the Tuba City Regional Health Care Corporation. Treating large swaths of the Hopi and Navajo reservations — the Navajo alone is the size of West Virginia — is inherently difficult.
Despite its dedicated medical staff, the hospital struggles “to bring, right here, appropriate state-of-the-art, specialty, critical-care medicine,” said Joseph Engelken, the hospital’s chief executive.
While the Indian health system has improved nationally and Indians are living longer, Dr. Roubideaux acknowledged problems, not all from underfunding, saying, “The list goes on and on in terms of areas that need improvement.”
Sometimes urgent “life or limb” cases get attention, while others, some serious, must wait.
Dr. David Yost, clinical director at the White Mountain Apache reservation in Arizona, cited “piles of care we have to put on the back burner,” including 150 cases this summer, some “waiting a year and a half.” This budget year, he said, 40 patients are still waiting, and about “10 people a month” are added to the list.
Ronnye Manuelito, 56, a Navajo in Naschitti, N.M., said he “almost felt like giving up” after waiting for brain surgery to quell blackouts, seizures and headaches experienced over three years from a shifting metal plate in his head from a childhood carousel injury.
One time he “left the stove on in the kitchen and passed out,” and another he had a seizure in a car, said his sister, Brenda. His Indian Health Service doctor “was trying to get him a referral to a specialist in Albuquerque, but they weren’t approving it because it wasn’t life-or-limb,” she said.
Ultimately, two surgical procedures helped him.
Dr. Roubideaux, speaking generally, said, “There are some places where funding is so short and there are so few health care providers, unfortunately people may have to wait quite a long time.”
A former reservation doctor herself, Dr. Roubideaux said she would see “someone who maybe had chronic knee pain and a little bit of surgery would help, yet the person was still walking,” making it non-life-threatening. “It’s really heartbreaking,” she said.
In cities, scarce Indian facilities and patchwork insurance can mean “a woman with a lump in her breast — we can’t guarantee we can get her into treatment in a reasonable period,” said Ralph Forquera, the executive director of the nonprofit Seattle Indian Health Board. “A cardiac problem? We can’t guarantee that person can get to see a specialist.”
Sometimes, Mr. Forquera said, when that woman is treated, “the lump has metastasized.” He added, “We’ve had people actually die on waiting lists.”
Jackie BirdChief, 46, a single mother with thyroid cancer, did not have to wait. She just had to move 200 miles from Phoenix to the Apache reservation she left in 1983, leaving her city, her job and, for months, her daughter, then 14. She moved because cost containment rules link coverage for care to establishing residency on reservations.
Ms. BirdChief, a secretary, was lucky because the Indian Health Service, her employer, “manipulated the system to make it work out for her,” Dr. Yost said. It found her jobs on the reservation, he said, “whereas someone working in a grocery store would have had to quit their job — or decide if they wanted to have the procedure.”
Still, Dr. Yost said, Ms. BirdChief “was a victim of our system, and ironically, she worked for the Indian health system.”
Living on a reservation, however, does not ensure accessible care.
Ruby Biakeddy’s six-sided hogan, a traditional Navajo home, without running water or a phone, is an hour’s drive on a dirt road from drinking water, and even farther from diabetes and blood pressure medication. Since her truck got swept away in a rain-swollen ditch five years ago, Ms. Biakeddy, 67, who tends sheep, must borrow her children’s vehicles.
“I recently ran out of the medicine I inject for a week,” she said in Navajo through a translator.
Serious cases, where getting care within the “golden hour” after problems start is critical, can also suffer. “For many of our patients,” said Dr. Anne Newland, acting clinical director of a clinic in Kayenta, Ariz., “that hour is gone by the time they get to us.”
Ciara Antone, 4, died on the Navajo reservation outside Tuba City from an apparent bowel obstruction. Her mother, Genita Yazzie, called 911, but said that with the distance and road conditions, the ambulance was two hours away.
“I kept telling the dispatcher, ‘My daughter’s coding, she’s not breathing,’ ” Ms. Yazzie said. Desperate, she drove to the closer Hopi reservation to get an ambulance, but by then, “they couldn’t bring her back.”
Whether a closer ambulance could have saved her daughter is unclear (the family has sued the non-Indian hospital that treated her). Henry Wallace, director of Navajo Emergency Medical Services, which Ms. Yazzie called first for an ambulance, declined to discuss the case, but said, “the geographic area is so large that the time factor is probably the biggest problem we have.”
“We really don’t have a golden hour,” he said. “Ours could be the golden three hours.”
Staffing shortages exacerbate things. Recently, Kayenta began closing its emergency room overnight, making Tuba City, at 90 minutes away, the closest hospital. At Indian hospitals and clinics nationally, a fifth of physician positions and a quarter of the nursing slots are unfilled.
Patients contribute to the frustrations. Nearly a third do not show up for scheduled surgery at Tuba City, often citing distance or cost.
Richard White, 61, acknowledged taking his medicine sporadically and drinking, aggravating his diabetes. He went blind, lost a toe and, during a Navajo medicine-man ceremony that he hoped would restore his vision, burned his other foot, which was then amputated.
“Stare at these incredible statistics, you become overwhelmed,” Dr. Yost said. “It’s like drinking out of a fire hydrant.”
Keeping a Promise
Congress’s goal, in using penalty and co-payment exemptions, is to encourage Indians to enroll in proposed programs like subsidized private insurance or expanded Medicaid, while respecting their sovereignty and the conviction that they are owed health care.
That conviction and bureaucratic hurdles have kept many eligible Indians from enrolling in Medicaid. But getting insurance allows Indians to receive care from more providers and allows the Indian system to get reimbursed from Medicaid or other insurers.
That would generate “an influx of capital,” said Jim Roberts, policy analyst for Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board, that “you can use to improve Indian health care.”
Some disagree. Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, said exemptions could discourage insurance enrollment, raise premiums for insured people and further stress the Indian health care system, which he called “poorly managed” and in need of billions of dollars to “keep the promise to Native Americans.”
Even if more Indians become insured, it will not end the problems, especially if providers and insurers, daunted by the alarming health problems, continue avoiding Indian Country.
Proposed legislation would not give Indians everything they want, but the overhaul does include grants for preventive care and research. And the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, which stands a good chance of being reauthorized by Congress for the first time since 2001, would enhance programs, physician recruitment and hospital construction. Although it approves no funding, advocates hope it will prompt additional money.
Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said that with the current climate in Congress, and “particularly the president, it’s definitely going to be easier to get Indian provisions in the health care bills.”
Easier, but no sure thing.
With expansions in public coverage or subsidies to buy private coverage, some lawmakers may question whether Indian Country should “still be getting direct payments to run I.H.S. clinics,” said Stephen Zuckerman, a health economist at the Urban Institute, a research group.
“Some people are saying, ‘We can’t make all these adjustments for you guys,’ ” Mr. Allen said, adding that some Indians reply: “Make us pay for health care, then the deal is off. Give us the land back, and we’re good.”

Obama for America's Gallup Pol - Nation

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Nadine Padilla, 25, had been doing get-out-the-vote work for the Native American Voters Alliance for two years when she was recruited by the Obama campaign, which was looking for Navajo organizers in New Mexico. She'd been an Obama fan since his 2004 DNC speech, and in August 2008 she took a position as field organizer for McKinley County, a rural area an hour from where she grew up.

"I showed up at headquarters, and the state director said, 'You need to open an office.... This is what you're gonna do. Go do it,'" Padilla recalls. She drove to Gallup, a border town of some 20,000 whites, Native Americans and Latinos. At a coffee shop she fundraised from local Democratic donors to pay the deposit on an office, and opened up shop in a space with big glass windows on Main Street.

For a while, Padilla was lonely in there--locals were skeptical about participating. "Some people would say, 'Why should I even vote? I have my own government,'" she recounts. (The Navajo nation has its own sovereign government.) But gradually, by conducting one-on-one meetings, Padilla developed a team of 130 volunteers. She says that the vast majority were working on a campaign for the first time, and most were under 30. Gallup has a small University of New Mexico campus, which turned out some college-age volunteers, and local high school students also signed up.

Padilla dropped phone sheets off in remote rural areas for less mobile volunteers. She also created a supervised kids' area at the office so parents could phone-bank. The office became like a community center, with a front area where people drank coffee, listened to music and chatted. The challenge was to move them to the back, where the phone-banking and data entry happened. But by the end of the campaign, Padilla's team was working nonstop--some volunteers were even sleeping in the office.

On election day the hard work paid off. "The volunteers did it themselves. They had come such a long way," she says. "On the first day, they were like, 'What do you want me to do? Talk to somebody about voting?' to being able to run the entire day themselves. I just brought them coffee."

On November 4 McKinley County had the highest increase in voter turnout in the state--36 percent--and Obama won it handily. Some of the volunteers are now preparing to campaign for a state representative candidate. For Padilla, that's the most gratifying part of her experience. "On the campaign we always said, 'Work yourself out of a job,'" she says. "Pass on these skills so that when you leave they'll have those tools for whatever they want."

Padilla has stayed in close touch with the volunteers, and she's helping them strategize for the state campaign. After the election, though she was tempted by DC, Padilla decided to stay close to home. "I always knew I was needed on the reserve," she says. Today she uses some of the skills she developed on the campaign in her role as a community organizer against uranium mining in northwestern New Mexico, where mining has created radioactive waste that continues to cause health problems like cancer. Padilla is the sole paid organizer for Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment, a coalition of volunteer-run groups, some of which are fighting new mining-company proposals while others work against soil contamination. It's a daunting issue that has affected her community for decades, which is why she took the gig. "I was inspired to take this job after the Obama campaign, because I had this feeling that anything was possible," she says.

About Elizabeth Méndez Berry

Elizabeth Méndez Berry, an award-winning journalist, has written about culture and politics for publications including the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Vibe.

Mexican Pot Gangs Infiltrate Indian Reservations in U.S. - WSJ.com

By JOEL MILLMAN

Washington State Patrol

Washington State Police got to this marijuana harvest before the Mexican gangs did.

WARM SPRINGS, Ore. -- Police Chief Carmen Smith says he knows three things about suspected drug trafficker Artemio Corona: He's from Mexico, prefers a Glock .40-caliber handgun, and is quite possibly growing marijuana on the Indian reservation that Mr. Smith patrols.

Last year, Mr. Smith's detectives identified Mr. Corona as the alleged mastermind behind several large marijuana plantations on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon. These "grows," as police call them, had a harvest of 12,000 adult plants, with an estimated street value of $10 million. Five suspects were arrested and pleaded guilty to federal trafficking charges. But their alleged boss, Mr. Corona, who has not been indicted, remains a "person of interest" to federal authorities and hasn't been found.

On the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington, tribal authorities hunt for illegal marijuana farms hidden deep in the forest. WSJ's Joel Millman reports.

Cultivating marijuana in Indian country represents a new twist in the decades-old illicit drug trade between Mexico and the U.S., the world's largest drug-consuming market. For decades, Mexican drug gangs grew marijuana in Mexico, smuggled it across the border, and sold it in the U.S. But in the past few years, they have done what any burgeoning business would do: move closer to their customers.

Illicit pot farms, the vast majority run by gangs with ties to Mexico, are growing fast across the country. The U.S. Forest Service has discovered pot farms in 61 national forests across 16 states this year, up from 49 forests in 10 states last year. New territories include public land in Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, Alabama and Virginia.

The area where Mexican gangs seem to be expanding the fastest is on Indian reservations. In Washington state, tribal police seized more than 233,000 pot plants on Indian land last year, almost 10 times the 2006 figure. Pot seized on Washington's reservations accounted for about half of all pot seized on both private and public land last year. Police are finding pot farms on reservations stretching from California to South Dakota.

"These criminal organizations are growing in Indian country at an alarming rate," says Chief Smith. "The [growers] on our reservation were sent directly from Mexico."

At Chief Smith's reservation, police found trash piles that included crushed Modelo-brand beer cans and tortilla packages. They also recovered cellphones with a flurry of calls to and from Michoacán, Mexico -- an important drug-producing state. One grow in Washington state's Yakama Reservation featured a makeshift shrine to Mexico's unofficial patron saint to smugglers, Jesús Malverde, complete with votive candles and a photograph of the mythical figure.

Part of the trend is due to unforeseen consequences of stepped-up security on the U.S. border to slow the tide of illegal immigration from Mexico. Tighter borders make it harder to smuggle pot north, creating the need to produce the cash crop closer to market.

U.S. officials say the quality, and thus price, of U.S. grown weed is much higher than that grown in Mexico. The Mexican variety, typically full of stems and leaves, with a lower content of THC, the active narcotic in marijuana, brings in about $500 to $700 a pound, estimates Washington State Patrol Lt. Richard Wiley, who monitors marijuana grows on the state's public lands. By contrast, a pound of Washington-grown marijuana can command $2,500 locally or up to $6,000 on the East Coast.

Arrests for a marijuana 'grow' valued at $10 million, from top to bottom: Héctor Castillo, Oscar Castillo-Zapién, Evan Michael Nelson and Alejandro Zapién

Warm Springs Tribal Police Department

Warm Springs Police Department

Warm Springs Police Department

Warm Springs Police Department

Marijuana is a lucrative business for Mexican cartels, generating at least $9 billion a year in estimated revenues, according to U.S. and Mexican officials. Mexican gangs are relying even more on income from pot, U.S. drug authorities say, as they burn through cash fighting each other and the Mexican government, which has launched a crackdown. The math is tempting. Start-up expense for about dozen plots, with 10,000 plants each, is well under $500,000, U.S. officials estimate, including the cost of hiring 100 workers to plant marijuana and then several "tenders" to water them for three to four months until harvest. Incidental costs might include generators, PVC pipe and food supplies for the growers. Those plants could fetch about $120 million on the open market. With such impressive profit margins, a cartel can afford to have dozens of grows spotted and eradicated for every one that it harvests successfully.

The tighter U.S.-Mexican border is also prompting an unwillingness by illegal farm workers to cross back and forth. These migrants have decided to stay put in El Norte rather than return to Mexico after harvest -- creating a year-round labor force in rural areas. In a down economy, those workers face long stretches of unemployment -- leaving them easily swayed by offers to make quick cash growing marijuana.

That seems to be happening in Indian country. Chief Smith, who is a Wichita tribal member from Oklahoma but came here for the job, says the cartel growing pot on his reservation was paying tenders $2,000 a month each to water and watch their plots.

Indian reservations are full of transients, either people from other tribes whose members have married into local families, or undocumented farmworkers from Mexico. "Around here it's not easy to tell who's a tribal member and who's Hispanic," says Police Chief Keith Hutchenson of Idaho's Coeur d'Alene Tribe. That makes it easier for Mexican drug traffickers to blend in, he adds.

A decade ago, police in Washington state say most of the state's pot was grown by hobbyists indoors, using high-powered lamps. But that has changed in recent years to larger, outdoor grows that are more "corporate," run by sophisticated Mexican gangs.

At first, the Mexican growers began using remote public parkland in California, and have since expanded toward neighboring Oregon and Washington. Both states have two things gangs need: lots of unguarded forest land and lots of cheap Mexican labor.

Mexico-based cartels exploit several conditions unique to reservations, starting with chronically understaffed tribal police departments. Overlapping jurisdictions between tribal courts and outside agencies -- from the local sheriff to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration -- confuse the issue of who should take the lead in prosecuting crimes.

Federal authorities coordinate with tribal authorities on issues related to investigations, search warrants and other criminal proceedings, says Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathleen Bickers of Portland, who prosecuted the men growing pot on the Warm Springs Reservation.

Another attraction is the sheer size of the jurisdictions. Colville Reservation is 2,200 square miles and patrolled by just 19 tribal police officers. The ancestral homes of tribes such as Oregon's Umatilla, Idaho's Nez Perce and Washington's Yakama have thousands of acres of often uninhabited land, and also abut huge tracts of public land.

The cartels often mix the marijuana plants in with other crops, such as corn, or plant them deep inside forests amid pine and oak trees to make them difficult to detect from air patrols.

The reservations aren't only home to marijuana farms but are becoming sites for gun trafficking. At the Yakama homeland, a 1.4-million-acre reservation near Toppenish, Wash., a Mexican gang allegedly has planted hundreds of acres of marijuana and run guns to Mexico. U.S. investigators say the guns have ended up in the hands of Mexico's most feared paramilitary drug group, Los Zetas.

There is enough gun trafficking that Washington state now ranks fourth as a supplier of weapons to Mexican drug gangs after Texas, California and Arizona, according to police. "A weapon bought here for $1,000 can be sold for $3,000 or even $6,000" south of the border, says Michael Akins, lead investigator for a multiagency drug task force, called Operation Green Jam. "That might buy cocaine for $3,000 a pound, which then could be sold in Washington for $20,000 a pound."

State police believe gunmen from Los Zetas, a group initially formed by deserters from Mexico's army and famed for its brutality, are already in Washington to provide security during harvests. In 2008 police recovered a small arsenal of powerful weapons near the Yakama grows.

"AR-15s and Berettas, mostly. At least a dozen," says Lt. Wiley, of the Washington State Patrol.

There is enough money involved in growing to tempt some legal residents. In September, law-enforcement officials in Benton County, Wash., busted three men working at a private ranch owned by Jose Luis Cardenas, a legal immigrant from Mexico. He allegedly earned $3,000 from a drug gang to rent his barn for eight days, the Benton County officials said. Stalks of fresh marijuana were dried and picked by workers arranged in a circle, like an old-time shucking bee, according to state police. Mr. Cardenas, who was charged with harboring and abetting illegal production of a controlled substance, is in custody, and didn't respond to requests for comment.

The operations can be elaborate. One site at the Yakama reservation sat more than a dozen miles from the nearest paved road. Tapping water from an abandoned livestock trough, growers had workers string more than 1,000 yards of plastic irrigation pipe down to a cistern that fed a primitive treetop sprinkler system.

Tribal police uncovered another irrigation network in July at the Colville Reservation, just south of the Canadian border. After damming a small spring, guerrilla cultivators strung drip irrigation pipe hundreds of yards to marijuana fields. At one spot, the gang dug a rustic cistern from the crater of a fallen ponderosa pine. Nearby, they ran a gasoline-powered generator hitched to a pump that took spring water to a second cistern almost a mile away. The jury-rigged spillway nourished a total of 24,000 plants along the mountain slope.

That grow at Colville was found deep in the backwoods, where the tribe harvests timber for two reservation lumber mills. Colville Police Chief Matt Haney suspects immigrant workers hired to replant trees end up doing reconnaissance work for drug organizations.

"We've got over a million acres and forest fires are common," the chief explains. "Mexican laborers are hired by the U.S. Forest Service to do replanting, and work for the tribe's timber operations, too. They notice where there are streams, where there aren't streams. What can be reached by road, what can't. They share that information with some very sophisticated growers."

Warms Springs Reservation police say the drug gangs planting marijuana on the reservation since 2007 may have had Mexican workers spotting sites for them. Workers are often hired by tribal enterprises, including a small company that collects pine cones and fronds to fashion into Christmas tree ornaments.

John Webb, a tribal police detective, says collecting pine cones gives outsiders an excuse to be on the reservation -- something normally not allowed -- and form friendships.

Mr. Webb doesn't know whether pine-cone collecting prompted Oscar Castillo Zapién to come to Warm Springs. But in September 2008, Mr. Castillo was arrested for assault after allegedly firing his Glock semiautomatic pistol into a van departing from his home, striking one passenger in the neck. Eventually police linked him to the outdoor marijuana grows, together with at least three cousins, Héctor Castillo, Alejandro Zapién and Alfredo Olivera.

The men told authorities, as part of a plea bargain, that they reported to Artemio Corona, who was also a relative. In court papers, some of the suspects claimed to have been terrorized by Mr. Corona, who they say threatened them with his own Glock as he supervised work in the secret marijuana gardens.

At first, the Mexican suspects thought operating on tribal land shielded them from prosecution, says Mr. Webb. While the tribal court declined to prosecute, federal authorities were eager to take the case. To avoid the cost of trial, the U.S. attorney in Portland allowed the five defendants to plead guilty to a relatively minor charge of "conspiracy to manufacture marijuana," and receive sentences of up to 70 months in prison. Four are now serving time in U.S. federal prisons. One received probation.

Tribal police in Washington and Oregon say they expect Mexican gangs to keep reappearing every year during the summer harvest season. Says Chief Smith: "If we ever catch them, we'll run them off the reservation."

Write to Joel Millman at joel.millman@wsj.com

A new demand for uranium power brings concerns for Navajo groups - washingtonpost.com

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Mining planned at a mountain considered sacred

By Kari Lydersen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 25, 2009

ACOMA, N.M.-- Uranium from the Grants Mineral Belt running under rugged peaks and Indian pueblos of New Mexico was a source of electric power and military might in decades past, providing fuel for reactors and atomic bombs.

Now, interest in carbon-free nuclear power is fueling a potential resurgence of uranium mining. But Indian people gathered in Acoma, N.M., for the Indigenous Uranium Forum over the weekend decried future uranium extraction, especially from nearby Mount Taylor, considered sacred by many tribes. Native people from Alaska, Canada, the Western United States and South America discussed the severe health problems uranium mining has caused their communities, including high rates of cancer and kidney disease.

Uranium companies and government authorities do not dispute this, and federal environmental remediation and workers' compensation programs related to past uranium mining are ongoing. But mining companies say today's methods and regulations have improved so much that locals have nothing to fear.

Uranium mining and milling in New Mexico began in the late 1940s but nearly ceased in the late 1980s as prices dropped. In 2007, prices climbed to a record $139 per pound, and companies applied for or renewed permits and staked new claims. The economic crisis has had a chilling effect, with prices now at about $43 per pound. But industry officials say they expect high prices soon, especially with the likely passage of a climate bill putting a price on carbon emissions.

The Grants Mineral Belt, extending 100 miles west from Albuquerque, holds 300 million pounds of extractable uranium. Companies are hoping to mine the country's largest single deposit, about 100 million pounds, around Mount Taylor. This year the National Trust for Historic Preservation named it one of the nation's 11 most endangered places, and the state granted protected status to a swath of the mountain. The company Rio Grande Resources wants to reopen a former Mount Taylor mine that yielded 8 million pounds of uranium for previous owner Chevron from 1986 to 1989.

About 50 miles from Mount Taylor, the company Hydro Resources Inc. (HRI) also plans to begin mining 101 million pounds starting around the Navajo towns of Church Rock and Crownpoint, N.M. HRI plans to do most of its extraction through in-situ leaching (ISL), where chemicals are injected into an aquifer to mobilize uranium deposits, then the metal is sucked out while the water is purified and returned to the aquifer. Rick Van Horn, senior vice president of operations for HRI's parent company, Uranium Resources, said the process is environmentally safe. Opponents fear it could contaminate their water supply.

"This has multi-generational effects. I won't even live long enough to see what it does to people in 500 years," said Earl Tulley, who lives near Church Rock and is vice president of the Navajo environmental group Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment. His wife had breast cancer and his daughter had an ovarian tumor removed, both of which were attributed to uranium exposure. "People are being taken apart from the inside out."

The Grand Canyon watershed also holds vast uranium deposits, with more than 8,000 mining claims filed over a 1 million-acre area. Interior Secretary Ken L. Salazar over the summer instituted a two-year moratorium on awarding new claims or beginning production on claims not already established as viable. While it is not tribal land, this region is considered sacred to many Indians. Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr. and other tribal leaders testified in support of a House bill introduced this year by Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) that would ban Grand Canyon watershed uranium mining.

Shirley is a staunch proponent of existing and proposed coal mining and coal-fired power in the Navajo Nation. For several years his administration has been fighting Navajo and outside environmentalists over the proposed Desert Rock coal-burning power plant, which would bring increased coal mining on the reservation. Shirley, who could not be reached for comment, has said the coal plant would be an economic boon for the reservation. Uranium proponents, including some Navajo, likewise say the industry would create badly needed investment and jobs on a reservation where unemployment regularly tops 50 percent.

Van Horn said HRI would create about 120 jobs for locals and would result in nearly $1 million a year in royalties to the Navajo Nation. Mount Taylor mine manager Joe Lister said their planned operations would create about 600 temporary construction jobs and 400 permanent jobs.

"Everyone is paying attention to the Native Americans and the environment, but where is Joe Public, that working man who comes in his car with his family from Arizona or Texas and asks, 'Are there any jobs here?' " he said. "No, there's no jobs now. But we hope there will be."

Chris Shuey, a specialist on uranium mining at the Southwest Research and Information Center, says many uranium companies do not intend to mine unless prices soar.

"I don't think they're being honest about the chances of new mining. They're . . . setting up false expectations," he said. "It doesn't take a lot of money to put up a fancy Web site. It's a whole other thing to actually reopen a mine, hire staff and produce that first ton of ore. If you're going to propose mining uranium, you should either put up or shut up. And these guys aren't doing it."

Tribal Casino Rules Revisited - WSJ.com

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White House Considers Altering Policy to Allow Gambling Far From Reservations

By A.D. PRUITT and PETER GRANT

The Obama administration may make it easier for Indian tribes to build casinos on land far from their reservations, a move likely to spur a wave of new casino development.

The Interior Department, which runs the Bureau of Indian Affairs, is reconsidering a Bush administration directive requiring that off-reservation casino sites be within commuting distance of the reservation. Many tribes, struggling with high unemployment and poverty on their reservations, are looking to casinos for jobs and other economic benefits.

Casino Applications

"It's an important issue. It's a controversial issue and they're rethinking it," George Skibine, a deputy assistant secretary at the bureau, said in an interview last week. He added he expected a decision on whether to change the policy "fairly soon."

Some governors, including Democrat David Paterson of New York and Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, have come out in favor of certain projects in recent months.

A reversal would pose more competition to existing casinos that are getting pummeled by the economic downturn. Owners of some of those casinos and their supporters in Congress are putting pressure on the Interior Department to maintain the restrictions on new developments off tribal lands. But have-not tribes are hoping the Obama administration will view casino development as a cheap way to stimulate the economy without tax dollars.

"Some governors have embraced this as a way to close their budget deficits," said Larry Rosenthal, a partner at Ietan Consulting LLC, a lobbying firm that represents Indian tribes.

About 22 Indian casinos on non-reservation land exist, and about 20 tribes have off-reservation plans in the works.

The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs of Oregon wants to develop a casino along the Columbia River Gorge, and the St. Regis Mohawks has plans for a site in the Catskill Mountains, about 350 miles away from the tribe's reservation -- not within the required commuting distance -- but less than a two-hour drive from New York City.

Some tribes note that the off-reservation sites they have identified are actually on their ancestral lands.

"We'd just be going back home," said Lewis Pitt, spokesman for the Warm Springs tribes in Oregon.

Even if the Obama administration reverses the policy, some tribes will face a rough time developing casinos anytime soon. With casinos across the country running into financial problems, many lenders are loath to finance new projects.

Indian casinos can be particularly problematic when they run into financial trouble. One example: Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, which is in talks with lenders to restructure an enormous debt load.

Moody's Investor Service has warned that lenders have limited recourse because, under U.S. law, they can't seize Indian casino assets in the case of a default or bankruptcy.

The anxieties of Foxwoods creditors were further stoked late last month after the New London Day reported that Michael Thomas, the chairman of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Council, which controls Foxwoods, sent a letter pledging to protect the payments to the tribal government and tribe members and saying that they would be "paid first."

The council subsequently put Mr. Thomas on administrative leave "pending the outcome of an internal review." It says it is pursuing a "mutually beneficial resolution with its banks and bondholders."

Mr. Thomas couldn't be reached for comment Sunday afternoon.

Despite these concerns, some off-reservation casino projects, especially those near major population centers, have been able to line up financing.

Kien Huat Realty III Ltd., an investment company owned by a Malaysian family that has financed start-ups of major Indian casinos in Connecticut and New York, is acquiring a near 50% stake in Empire Resorts Inc., the company that has been working with the St. Regis Mohawks on plans for a casino in Monticello, N.Y.

About 300 casinos have been developed by tribes since a watershed U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1987 that greatly loosened state restrictions on such operations. In 1988, Congress said tribes could develop off-reservation casinos that were in the best interest of the tribe and not detrimental to the local community.

Some of the tribes that developed casinos early on have joined with Las Vegas and Atlantic City gambling interests to try to block off-reservation gaming.

Last week five senators from Nevada, California and Arizona wrote Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to oppose off-reservation gaming, saying it "violates the spirit" of Indian gaming law.