This Week in Native American News (1/17/2020): Land taxes, public health crises, and living history
January 17, 2020
Native American 'land taxes': a step on the roadmap for reparations
To help the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust rework the land, local residents and businesses can pay the organization a Shuumi land tax. Photograph: Courtesy of Sogorea Te’ Land Trust
The two-acre plot deep within east Oakland is a bright green oasis surrounded by urban sprawl. The creek that runs through it has been sealed with cement, and an interstate highway has been built overhead. But for Corrina Gould, this piece of land represents justice for Native Californians.
It is the first parcel promised to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an intertribal, women-led organization that Gould co-founded in order to restore Indigenous land in the Bay Area to Indigenous stewardship.
“This is where my people – the Lisjan people – come from,” said Gould, a spokeswoman for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan and a community organizer. She often imagines her grandparents’ grandparents sitting by the creek back when salmon still swam through it.
To help the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust rework the land, populate it with native fruits and herbs, transform into a community and to restore even more land to California’s Indigenous community, local residents and businesses can pay the organization a Shuumi land tax.
“Shuumi in our language means gift,” Gould explained. Non-Native residents can choose to pay the tax as a way to show support and gratitude for the Native people hosting them on their ancestral lands.
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Native New Mexican writes popular superhero Navajo folklore book
The main character in a new fantasy book is one we don't see a lot of these days, and the superhero story is set in New Mexico.
"Race to the Sun" is the name of the book and the main character is a young Native American girl.
Local author Rebecca Roanhorse is a black, indigenous writer from the Ohkay Owingeh Pubelo. She said the world need more characters like this, and she wants kids to know writing their stories matters.
"With Marvel, 'Star Wars' and all of these things, there's never any Native American characters,” Roanhorse said.
"Race to the Sun" is something she hopes changes the faces of those blockbuster movies and comics.
Roanhorse enjoys teaching kids how to develop their narratives, because she believes it's time the world hears and reads what Native American kids have to say.
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How ‘Indian Relocation’ Created a Public Health Crisis
Life expectancies and other health stats for Native Americans lag far behind other communities. At the Standing Rock Indian Health Service in Fort Yates, North Dakota, Dr. Lynelle Noisy Hawk examines a patient Will Kincaid/AP
Growing up as a member of the Ojibwe tribe, Melissa Walls knew that that diabetes ran in her maternal family. “I’ve lost two very close family members, my great grandfather and an uncle, to complications related to type 2 diabetes,” she says. But it wasn’t until she began studying American Indian health in graduate school, at the suggestion of another uncle who served as a liaison between academics and local tribal communities, that she understood that her family’s plight was part of a much larger problem.
American Indian adults are more than twice as likely as white adults to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, according to the Office of Minority Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Native American youth experience the highest and fastest-growing rate of the disease of any racial or ethnic group. But those statistics only scratch the surface of the kinds of health disparities that indigenous people face.
Can you explain how government policy induced historical trauma in the indigenous population?
The historical trauma encompasses a lot of government actions like setting up reservations and marching people across the country. Then in the the 1950s and ’60s, the government started a relocation program to get [Native Americans] into urban areas, and give them job training programs. It failed miserably, like most of these things did, in part because the job training was woefully inadequate, and often [the jobs available] were temp work or summer employment, if anything.
[The relocation policy] was rooted in this flawed idea that all people need to look and act like European Americans, and live the way they do. It’s shocking, if you go into some of these government records, just how blatantly plain the language is about how the goal was really to exterminate or assimilate.
That has impact on communities, and we see it play out in terms of mental health, substance abuse, suicide, and other chronic diseases.
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In similar News… Initiative Trains Native American Women As Doulas To Improve Health Care Outcomes
History Today:
Mayflower 400 could help recover lost Native American treasure
Native Americans whose ancestors suffered at the hands of 17th-century European settlers and adventurers are hoping commemorative events marking the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s journey will reveal their story to the whole world – and even lead to the recovery of one their long-lost treasures.
A year-long series of exhibitions, performances and community events will be centered on the Devon port of Plymouth, four centuries after the ship set sail for North America. Organizers say the close involvement of members of the Wampanoag Nation, whose ancestors were all but wiped out following the arrival of the colonists in 1620, is crucial to the success of the project.
Virginia’s Monacan tribe uses new federal status to take a stand for what could be its long-lost capital
No one doubts that layers of history lie at this spot southeast of Charlottesville where the Rivanna River flows into the James. Abandoned canal locks loom like castle walls; Revolution-era buildings stand in ruins nearby.
But one group of Virginians claims the land has even deeper significance. The Monacan Indians, chased out some 300 years ago, believe the V where the two rivers meet was the site of their ancient capital, Rassawek. Now, they are fighting to protect it.
The Art Scene:
Northern exposure: Textile Museum exhibition explores the art of Inuit printmaking
Canadians tend to think of Inuit art as something that adorns a gallery wall, not your living-room curtains. For a brief period in the 1960s, however, a handful of artists at Kinngait Studios in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, set out to change this with a collection of hand-printed textiles. An exhibition at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto tells the story of this forgotten initiative, while celebrating the new generation of Inuit textile designers who are following in its footsteps.
Cree youths explore impact of solar project through film
A six-acre solar farm on the Ermineskin Cree Nation, south of Edmonton, is the backdrop of five short films created by Indigenous teenagers.
Twelve students from Ermineskin Junior High School explored the farm's impact on their community through the eyes of five elders. Elias Burnstick, 15, and two classmates, told the story of Elder Ron Littlechild.
"My favorite part was going to his house, talking with him and learning more about him," Burnstick said. "Everybody has a story to tell. My story is just beginning, but people have stories that go on for years."
WATCH THIS: Words from a Bear
It’s hard to fit all the news in a little space.
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