This Week in Native American News (2/28/2020): Stay Strong, Travel, Eat Well, and Read
February 28, 2020
‘I gotta stay strong’: the Native American families with a legacy of violent deaths
Women take part in an annual event honoring the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Photograph: Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters
When Pauline HighWolf’s son came to her home in Montana three months ago to tell her that her sister was dead, she was overwhelmed by a painful jolt of deja vu.
HighWolf, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, had been helping her 64-year-old sister Laverna Wallowing to transition out of homelessness in California to a senior living apartment in southern Montana. Wallowing had died of a head injury, but HighWolf still doesn’t know how or why.
Almost five years earlier, HighWolf had received similar news at her home. Her youngest daughter Allison, or “Babez” as her family liked to call her, was found dead in a Rodeway Inn in Hardin, Montana.
Officials reported there was a fire in the 25-year-old’s motel room and she died of smoke inhalation. But in a coroner’s report from Montana’s forensics department that was shared with the Guardian, the manner of death was listed as “undetermined”.
“What’s going on with my family?” HighWolf, 60, asked. “There’s times when I just want to cry and scream, but I gotta stay strong.”
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A Nomadic Start To Photographing Inuit Culture Across Countries
Top: Bruce Inglangasak (left) and his friend Herman Oyagak look for a way through the sea ice that is close to shore near Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 2018. Left: Coco chases his ball. Inglangasak and his daughter adopted Coco while visiting their relatives in Aklavik, Canada, in 2017. Right: Polar bear art outside of the home of Marie and Eddie Rexford in Kaktovik, Alaska. (Brian Adams)
Brian Adams has spent his photography career reconnecting with his own Inuit culture. Raised in Girdwood, Alaska, Adams is half Iñupiat but grew up largely disconnected from his indigenous culture. Iñupiat people are part of an Inuit group, which includes indigenous people in northern Alaska, arctic Canada, Greenland and Russia.
"Since 2007, [I am] really just trying to reconnect to my roots, my family and my culture," Adams said.
Adams is based in Anchorage and has created two bodies of work, I AM ALASKAN, where he focused on Alaska's diversity, and I AM INUIT, where he photographed Inuit people in Alaska. Now he is going deeper.
In Adams' latest project, Ilatka: The Inuit Word For My Relatives, he is planning to photograph Inuit people in many of the circumpolar countries — those located near Earth's poles — where they migrated and settled. He started the project in Alaska and Canada in 2018.
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Alaska father speaks out after his kids find traditional dishes listed in book of ‘disgusting’ foods
’Take Your Pick of Disgusting Foods ’ by G. G. Lake
David has written extensively on internalized oppression and postcolonial psychology. It was David’s children — who are Filipino and Athabascan — who first brought his attention to the troubling content.
“I picked them up from school just like everyday. We were driving home and then my 10-year-old, my oldest son, from the back of the car, I heard him ask me if I ate balut. It seemed like out of nowhere ... but I just said yes, I have. Then, a few minutes later, I heard him say, ‘What? They have maktak on here?’ So, then I looked in my rearview mirror and I saw him reading a book.”
The book in question was Capstone Publishing's "Take Your Pick of Disgusting Foods" by G. G. Lake. It features descriptions of dishes from around the world.
The food David's children asked him about was balut, which is a fertilized duck egg that is boiled and eaten from the shell. It was one of two Filipino dishes featured in the book, David said.
Maktak (which appears in the text as “muktuk”) is bowhead whale skin and blubber and is a common Alaska Native traditional food.
The descriptions for balut and maktak use language and words intended to surprise or shock readers and warn of the possible dangers of eating them.
When they got home, David flipped through the book and then sat down with his kids.
“I told them the book is wrong, that we should not regard the foods that are listed in there as ‘disgusting,’ ” he said. “I told them that for many people, their food is a reflection of their culture, so it’s more than just food.”
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For Native Americans, a history of pain — and reasons for hope
Former Senator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), pictured in 1994, writes that he was moved by a newspaper photo of a young Native girl who was abused in foster care. In his book, her sufferings parallel those faced by Native Americans throughout history. (Maureen Keating/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images)
Sitting in his Washington office 30 years ago, Byron Dorgan, then a Democratic congressman from North Dakota, picked up a copy of the Bismarck Tribune and was struck by a front-page photo of a young girl with a tear running down her face.
The story was about the abuse of Native American children in the state’s foster-care system, and the girl in the photo, Tamara, was one of its youngest victims. As a 2-year-old she had been so severely beaten that, three years later, she “was in full emotional retreat.” According to her grandfather, “she spent her time huddling in the shadows, singing television jingles as if they were hymns that might bring her into the light,” Dorgan writes in “The Girl in the Photograph.”
The photo of Tamara haunted Dorgan. He visited the Standing Rock Indian Reservation where she lived and launched inquiries into the system that had allowed such abuse to occur. Tamara’s life, he learned, was already a full timeline of misery and despair. She had been removed from the charge of her alcoholic parents and placed in a foster-care system that would leave her forever scarred.
But Dorgan’s book is only nominally about Tamara. He tells her story against the backdrop of the epic struggles and historic mistreatment of American Indians. It’s hard not to see a parallel between the sins committed against Tamara over the past three decades and the litany of sins committed against Native Americans — genocide, theft, discrimination, abandonment — that began centuries ago and continues to this day.
Tamara’s homelessness, Dorgan writes, “was a continuation of a centuries-old cycle that began when Native Americans were driven from their ancestral homes. So many promises have been broken along the way. Always, capitalism — if not theft — trumped human rights and morality. We’ve salted their ground instead of seeding it.”
If the book is a reminder of all our nation’s misdeeds against the country’s original inhabitants, it is also a call to action. In each chapter, Dorgan presents a problem faced by Native Americans that seems intractable and then offers examples of individuals or tribes that have succeeded despite the enormous challenges.
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It’s hard to fit all the news in a little space.
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