The Indian Self-determination & Education Assistance Act?
Signed into law on 4 January 1975, this legislation completed a fifteen-year period of policy reform with regard to American Indian tribes. Passage of this law made self-determination, rather than termination, the focus of government action, reversing a thirty-year effort to sever treaty relationships with and obligations to Indian tribes. The disastrous consequences of termination, combined with aggressive Indian activism, had encouraged a reexamination of government policy. During the 1960s, the War on Poverty's Community Action programs, with their philosophy of "maximum feasible participation of the poor," also encouraged a change in direction. Significant too were President Lyndon B. Johnson's 1968 congressional message on Indian affairs entitled "The Forgotten American" and Richard M. Nixon's official repudiation of termination in 1970.
A policy of self-determination committed the federal government to encouraging "maximum Indian participation in the Government and education of the Indian people." The 1975 legislation contained two provisions. Title I, the Indian Self-Determination Act, established procedures by which tribes could negotiate contracts with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to administer their own education and social service programs. It also provided direct grants to help tribes develop plans to assume responsibility for federal programs. Title II, the Indian Education Assistance Act, attempted to increase parental input in Indian education by guaranteeing Indian parents' involvement on school boards.
Subsequent amendments to the Self-Determination Act adopted in the 1980s and 1990s launched self-governance. Under this program, tribes would receive bloc grants from the Indian Health Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to cover a number of programs. In 2000, about half of the bureau's total obligations to tribes took the form of self-determination contracts or bloc grants. Additionally, seventy-six tribes had contracted for health clinics, diabetes programs, mobile health units, alcohol and drug abuse clinics, and Community Health Representative programs through the Indian Health Service. As amended, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act stands as one of the twentieth century's seminal pieces of federal Indian legislation.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Culture by Momaday at the Rasmuson Theater
By: Jerry Reynolds
WASHINGTON - Writing and language are not identical. The tradition of oral storytelling is much more ancient than writing, and author N. Scott Momaday may well be onto something when he says, ''Writing gives us a sense of false security. ... Everything in the oral tradition is just one generation away from extinction.''
By extension, everything in the written tradition could also be at risk in a generation; but cultures based on writing, which is most of them these days, don't see beyond the illusion of durability provided by material pages, not even as volumes of writing vaporize daily in cyberspace.
It's a viewpoint, apparently Momaday's own. But he would be a more convincing advocate of these and other positions if he were not a past master of both writing and public reading, as he proved again Nov. 28 at the National Museum of the American Indian's Rasmuson Theater. To hear him was to suspect that the divide between oral and written storytelling is no more vast than that between the arts and sciences - people, special people perhaps, will always bridge it; and other people, perhaps no less special, will always possess the aptitude to appreciate and embrace their achievement.
And so with Momaday, the great and greatly honored writer (Pulitzer Prize for ''House Made of Dawn,'' National Medal for the Arts, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of Italy's highest literary award, poet laureate of Oklahoma in the state's centennial year) who reads from manufactured pages in a deep-pitched, authoritative yet friendly voice that doesn't know the meaning of off-balance or unnatural or out-of-key, as if born for the improvisational stage. (Another of Momaday's views is that live theater - calling all Native-language Shakespearians: he mentioned ''Hamlet'' - is contemporary culture's nearest approximation to oral storytelling.) He closed with an oral reading of surpassing satisfaction for the audience, but it was based on a piece of his writing that is surely in the first rank of artful prose.
There's more here: http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096416426
WASHINGTON - Writing and language are not identical. The tradition of oral storytelling is much more ancient than writing, and author N. Scott Momaday may well be onto something when he says, ''Writing gives us a sense of false security. ... Everything in the oral tradition is just one generation away from extinction.''
By extension, everything in the written tradition could also be at risk in a generation; but cultures based on writing, which is most of them these days, don't see beyond the illusion of durability provided by material pages, not even as volumes of writing vaporize daily in cyberspace.
It's a viewpoint, apparently Momaday's own. But he would be a more convincing advocate of these and other positions if he were not a past master of both writing and public reading, as he proved again Nov. 28 at the National Museum of the American Indian's Rasmuson Theater. To hear him was to suspect that the divide between oral and written storytelling is no more vast than that between the arts and sciences - people, special people perhaps, will always bridge it; and other people, perhaps no less special, will always possess the aptitude to appreciate and embrace their achievement.
And so with Momaday, the great and greatly honored writer (Pulitzer Prize for ''House Made of Dawn,'' National Medal for the Arts, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of Italy's highest literary award, poet laureate of Oklahoma in the state's centennial year) who reads from manufactured pages in a deep-pitched, authoritative yet friendly voice that doesn't know the meaning of off-balance or unnatural or out-of-key, as if born for the improvisational stage. (Another of Momaday's views is that live theater - calling all Native-language Shakespearians: he mentioned ''Hamlet'' - is contemporary culture's nearest approximation to oral storytelling.) He closed with an oral reading of surpassing satisfaction for the audience, but it was based on a piece of his writing that is surely in the first rank of artful prose.
There's more here: http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096416426
Developer must repair, protect Indian mounds
By: Amy Rinard
Summit - State officials have ordered Pabst Farms developers to repair and better protect American Indian effigy mounds near a large construction site after work crews damaged the panther-shaped burial sites. Pat Manders, who lives near the Pabst Farms property, notified state and local authorities of the damage done to the mounds. Tire ruts are visible in an American Indian mound on the Pabst Farms property south of I-94. The mounds have now been surrounded by protective fencing.
Workers put up fencing Wednesday along the edges of the three earthen mounds on land that Pabst Farms Development owns east of the site of the Aurora hospital under construction at the southeast corner of I-94 and Highway 67.
Archaeologists from the Wisconsin Historical Society inspected the mounds Tuesday and ordered the fencing to prevent further damage. "We responded immediately," Dan Warren, development manager for Pabst Farms, said Wednesday.
Get the whole story here: http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=708257
Summit - State officials have ordered Pabst Farms developers to repair and better protect American Indian effigy mounds near a large construction site after work crews damaged the panther-shaped burial sites. Pat Manders, who lives near the Pabst Farms property, notified state and local authorities of the damage done to the mounds. Tire ruts are visible in an American Indian mound on the Pabst Farms property south of I-94. The mounds have now been surrounded by protective fencing.
Workers put up fencing Wednesday along the edges of the three earthen mounds on land that Pabst Farms Development owns east of the site of the Aurora hospital under construction at the southeast corner of I-94 and Highway 67.
Archaeologists from the Wisconsin Historical Society inspected the mounds Tuesday and ordered the fencing to prevent further damage. "We responded immediately," Dan Warren, development manager for Pabst Farms, said Wednesday.
Get the whole story here: http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=708257
9th Circuit issues decision in aboriginal title case
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday ruled against a member of the Karuk Tribe of California who claimed aboriginal title n a national forest.
Karen Lowry was charged with trespassing in the Klamath National Forest. The U.S. Forest Service said she didn't have a special-use authorization and hadn't received an Indian allotment for the property she was occupying.
As part of her case, Lowry raised an aboriginal title defense. Her parents and grandparents have lived in the Oak Bottom area of the forest since the late 1800s and the Karuk people have occupied the same area for thousands of years.
Lowry argued that it was up to the government to prove she didn't have aboriginal title. But the 9th Circuit, in what it called a "question of first impression," said the burden was on the defendant.
In the unanimous decision, the court said "if we were to place the burden on the government, we would create a presumption that Indians have an individual aboriginal claim until the United States proves otherwise. Such a presumption might prove unworkable in a number of ways—not the least being that it might subject some national forest system lands to multiple claims of ownership and leave the United States unable to manage its lands effectively."
The court also ruled on the merits of Lowry's claim and said she didn't prove aboriginal title to the parcel she occupied. Her ancestors lived on nearby parcels but not on the same plot of land, the court said.
"There is no basis in the case law to expand a claim of individual aboriginal title based on occupancy of one parcel of land to include another parcel that was never so occupied," the 9th Circuit stated.
Karen Lowry was charged with trespassing in the Klamath National Forest. The U.S. Forest Service said she didn't have a special-use authorization and hadn't received an Indian allotment for the property she was occupying.
As part of her case, Lowry raised an aboriginal title defense. Her parents and grandparents have lived in the Oak Bottom area of the forest since the late 1800s and the Karuk people have occupied the same area for thousands of years.
Lowry argued that it was up to the government to prove she didn't have aboriginal title. But the 9th Circuit, in what it called a "question of first impression," said the burden was on the defendant.
In the unanimous decision, the court said "if we were to place the burden on the government, we would create a presumption that Indians have an individual aboriginal claim until the United States proves otherwise. Such a presumption might prove unworkable in a number of ways—not the least being that it might subject some national forest system lands to multiple claims of ownership and leave the United States unable to manage its lands effectively."
The court also ruled on the merits of Lowry's claim and said she didn't prove aboriginal title to the parcel she occupied. Her ancestors lived on nearby parcels but not on the same plot of land, the court said.
"There is no basis in the case law to expand a claim of individual aboriginal title based on occupancy of one parcel of land to include another parcel that was never so occupied," the 9th Circuit stated.
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