Go On! Native American women

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia and other events of interest)

"Gender Justice and Indian Sovereignty: Native American Women and the Law" is the theme of the 10th Anniversary Women and the Law Conference to be held Friday, February 18, at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, San Diego, California. (A cofounder of this annual conference is IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Susan Tiefenbrun.)
Delivering the keynote address, "Resistance, Resilience, and Reconcilitation: Reflections on Native American Women and the Law," will be Stacy L. Leeds (below right), Interim Associate Dean, Professor, and Director of Tribal Law and Government Center, University of Kansas School of Law. Leeds is also the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for the Kickapoo Tribe, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for the Kaw Nation, and Chief Judge of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation District Court.
Topics to be discussed by panelists -- academics, judges, attorneys, and other members of many indigenous pueblos, nations, and tribes -- include:
► Intersectionality and Civil Rights
► Gender-Related Violence and Indian Country Law Enforcement
► Building the Future: Indian Country Economic Development
► Building the Future: Developing Tribal Governments and Courts
Details and registration for the conference, which is co-sponsored by the California Indian Law Association, may be found here.

On December 29

On this day in ...
.... 1890 (120 years ago today), in South Dakota, U.S. cavalry troops entered an encampment of Lakota Sioux. A shot was fired and a gunfight ensued. When the Wounded Knee Massacre was over, more than 150 Lakota children, women, and men were dead -- indeed, the actual death toll may have been twice that; another 47 children and women, plus 4 men, were wounded. (credit for 2003 photo of tombstone marking mass grave, on Pine Ridge reservation) U.S.military casualties: 25 dead, 39 wounded. Eyewitness accounts may be found here.

(Prior December 29 posts are here, here, and here.)

On September 8

On this day in ...
... 1565 (445 years ago today),"with many banners spread, to the sound of trumpets and salutes of artillery," according to a contemporary journal, a Spanish "general took formal possession of the country in the name of his Majesty" -- the country being what is now the United States. The landing took place at what is now St. Augustine (right), a city on the northeastern coast of Florida. (credit for 1589 map) The event marked establishment of the 1st continuously occupied European settlement in North America, then inhabited by the peoples now called Native Americans.


(Prior September 8 posts are here, here, and here.)

International Day of Indigenous People

Today, August 9th, is the 16th annual International Day of the World's Indigenous People. This day was first declared by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 49/214. (prior IntLawGrrls post) The date marks the day of the first meeting, in 1982, of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations of the Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights.
Here is what Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon had to say about this year's celebration:

Indigenous peoples still experience racism, poor health and disproportionate poverty. In many societies, their languages, religions and cultural traditions are stigmatised and shunned. The first-ever UN report on the State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples in January 2010 set out some alarming statistics. In some countries, indigenous peoples are 600 times more likely to contract tuberculosis than the general population. In others, an
indigenous child can expect to die twenty years before his or her non-indigenous compatriots.
The theme of this year’s Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples is indigenous filmmakers, who give us windows into their communities, cultures and history. Their work connects us to belief systems and philosophies; it captures both the daily life and the spirit of indigenous communities. As we celebrate these contributions, I call on Governments and civil society to fulfill their commitment to advancing the status of indigenous peoples everywhere.

The photos in this blog post are all of Carrie Dann. She is one of the most inspiring women I have ever met, and an indigenous leader who has been fighting for the rights of the Western Shoshone for decades.

In passing: Wilma Mankiller

(In passing marks the memory of a person featured in IntLawGrrls)

Wilma Mankiller (left) succumbed yesterday to pancreatic cancer at her home near Tahlequah, in eastern Oklahoma.
As we've posted, a quarter-century ago Mankiller "became the 1st woman Chief of a major Native American tribe." Her New York Times obituary, published today, credits her with "revitaliz[ing] the Cherokee Nation’s tribal government and improv[ing] its education, health and housing ..." (credit for 2005 photo)
She spoke often on issues affecting indigenous peoples; a video clip from a 2008 talk is here.
Mankiller was born 64 years ago in Tahlequah, the 6th of 11 children born to a Cherokee father and a Dutch-Irish mother. When she was 10 or 11,

the family moved to San Francisco as part of a relocation policy of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Its aim was to move Indians off federally subsidized reservations with the promise of jobs in America’s big cities.

She spoke of the move this way in a 1993 NYT interview:

'I set out on what I call my own little Trail of Tears.'

In San Francisco, Mankiller married early and in her 20s was known as "Mrs. Hugo Olaya." But as we've posted, she became

politicized when she joined the occupation of Alcatraz. She then moved back to Oklahoma to apply her skills on behalf of her people. Reelected Chief once, Mankiller resigned in 1995 because of ill health.

Yesterday the current Cherokee leader said on the tribe's website:

'We are better people and a stronger tribal nation because of her example of Cherokee leadership, statesmanship, humility, grace, determination and decisiveness. When we become disheartened, we will be inspired by remembering how Wilma proceeded undaunted through so many trials and tribulations.'

On March 27

On this day in ...
... 1973, Sacheen Littlefeather (right) became an internationally known name, for a time at least, when she appeared at the Academy Awards ceremony in lieu of Marlon Brando, named Best Actor for his performance in The Godfather, and announced "that he very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award," on account of "the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry" -- at which point some in the audience booed, others clapped -- "and on television in movie re-runs, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee," about which 2 very different accounts may be found here and here. A video clip of Littlefeather's speech is here.

(Prior March 27 posts are here, here, and here)

On February 22

On this day in ...
... 1630 (380 years ago today), in what's now the United States of America, English settlers discovered the delights of an indigenous treat, popcorn (left), "when Quadequine, brother of
Massasoit (chief of the Wampanoag tribe), brought a deerskin pouch of the stuff to them." The puffy morsel was called "popcorn" as a derivation from "the AmerIndian phrase 'maize blown up by fire.'"

(Prior February 22 posts are here, here, and here)

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

I'd rather see myself played by a Puerto Rican or an Italian with a tan than have them ruin the basketballness of me.

-- Sherman Alexie (right), author of works this IntLawGrrl much admires, on why, according to this article in The New York Times, "[h]e turned down offers to sell the movie rights to" his young-adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), "a book he calls an extremely faithful recounting of his experience growing up poor on the Spokane tribal reservation in eastern Washington State." In the few words of the quoted sentence, Alexie speaks volumes about the complexities of assigned and self-perceived identities.

On September 10

On this day in ...
... 1852, a daughter, Alice, was born in a Cherokee mission town in Oklahoma to Dr. J.F. Brown and Lucy Graybeard. A member of the Katcvlke, or Tiger Clan, of the Seminoles, she studied at a mission school and then, in 1874, married George Davis, with whom she had 11 children. The couple operated a trading post and post office. Alice Brown Davis (left) also was a teacher and school superintendent, as well as a court interpreter for the Seminoles. She served with the Dawes Commission appointed by the U.S. government to allot tribal lands. In 1922 President Warren G. Harding appointed her the Chairman, or chief, of the Seminole Tribe. The 1st Seminole woman thus to lead her people, Davis held the position until her death in 1935.
... 1954 (55 years ago today), U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming. A former state legislator, she was elected to Congress in November 2008.

(Prior September 10 posts are here and here.)

On August 24

On this day in ...
... 79 (1,930 years ago today), in the Italian coastal region near the Bay of Naples, Mount Vesuvius erupted, and the lava that flowed from the volcano buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and killed tens of thousands of inhabitants. Excavations beginning in the 18th C. unearthed artifacts like the fresco at left. (photo credit) Other "effusive eruptions" of Vesuvius (below right) (credit) occurred sporadically between 1631 and 1944. Today "[m]any towns are located on the volcano's flanks, and several million people live within areas potentially affected by eruptions of Vesuvius."
... 1816, 3 U.S. commissioners plenipotentiary concluded a treaty of "Peace, Friendship, and Limits," with leaders of several Native American tribes. By this Treaty of St. Louis the chiefs ceded land in what is now the Midwest of the United States in exchange for monetary compensation.

(Prior August 24 posts are here and here)

On July 8

On this day in ...
… 1992, The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (logo at right) created the office of High Commissioner on National Minorities. According to the OSCE website,

The post of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities was established in 1992 to identify and seek early resolution of ethnic tensions that might endanger peace, stability or friendly relations between OSCE participating States.

High Commissioner Knut Vollebaek, former Norwegian ambassador to the United States, began a 3-year term in 2007.
… 1970, U.S. President Richard Nixon (below left) delivered a special congressional message enunciating Native American self-determination as official U.S. policy. Previously, it had been the stated policy objective of the federal government eventually to terminate the trusteeship relation between the federal government and tribal nations. (photo credit) In his address, "Message from the President of the United States Transmitting Recommendations for Indian Policy," Nixon contended that such termination policies did not work, and called instead for broad-sweeping self-determination legislation. Five years later, Congress would pass the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act.

(Prior July 8 posts are here and here.)

On June 23

On this day in ...
… 1683, William Penn signed the “Great Treaty” with the chiefs of the Lenni Lenape tribe to guarantee the peace among them. The area of land they where sharing was given to Penn by England's King Charles II. Penn later named this land Pennsylvania. On that day, William Penn reportedly said:

'We meet on the broad pathway of good faith and good-will; no advantage shall be taken on either side, but all shall be openness and love. We are the same as if one man’s body was to be divided into two parts; we are of one flesh and one blood.'

Tamanend, one of the chiefs, is said to have replied:

“We will live in love with William Penn and his children as long as the creeks and rivers run, and while the sun, moon, and stars endure.”

The Great Treaty was not broken until the Penn’s Creek Massacre of October 16, 1755. (credit for Penn's Treaty with the Indians, by Benjamin West, 1771)
… 1889 (120 years ago today), Anna Akhmatova (right), a poet credited with a large influence on Russian poetry, was born Anna Gorenko in Odessa, Ukraine. Her most accomplished works, Requiem, which was not published in its entirety in Russia until 1987, and Poem Without a Hero, are reactions to the horror of the Stalinist Terror, a period during which she endured artistic repression as well as tremendous personal loss. She was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize in 1964 and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1965. Two years before her death at the age of 76, Akhmatova was chosen president of the Writers' Union. Akhmatova died in Leningrad, where she had spent most of life, in 1966. (credit for 1922 portrait of Anna Akhmatova by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin)

(Prior June 23 posts are here and here.)

On June 2

On this day in ...
... 1924 (85 years ago today), President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act, then posed with Osage men for the photo at right, taken on the White House lawn. (credit) Until that day Native Americans had been admitted to citizenship in the United States of America only by marriage to white men, through military service, or by a few other special means; they were not considered citizens by birth, nor permitted to citizenship through naturalization. The new statute provided:

'Be it enacted by the Senate and house of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all noncitizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided, That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.'

... 2005, Melita Norwood died at age 93. The Londoner had led a life unnoticed until 1999, when it was discovered that she'd been a Soviet spy for more than 4 decades. Norwood (left) had joined the Communist party in 1936. (photo credit) The she started working a clerk and a secretary for a metallurgical firm that worked on Britain's nuclear program, "and was soon passing research data to the NKVD, the Soviet spy network and predecessor of the KGB." An octogenarian, widow, and great-grandmother by the time she was exposed, she said her only regret was being caught:

'I thought I’d got away with it.'

(Prior June 2 posts are here and here.)

On May 6

On this day in ...
... 1877, less than a year after he helped to destroy the 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn, Montana, Lakota Chief Crazy Horse surrendered to U.S. troops at the Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska. According to a Public Broadcasting Service website, "constant military harassment and the decline of the buffalo population eventually forced" him and his band to give up. Crazy Horse (right) would be killed by bayonet 4 months later.
... 1889 (120 years ago today), in Paris, France, a World's Fair known as l'Exposition universelle opened for a 6-month run. The only attraction still standing is among the best known from any fair: the 300-meter Eiffel Tower, which was opened to the public within 2 weeks of this inauguration date.

(Prior May 6 posts are here and here.)

On January 22

On this day in ...
... 1690, 80 sachems, or Native American leaders, met at Onondaga, in what is now upstate New York, and ratified a treaty of peace with the British and against the French. (credit for photo of Onondaga Lake)
... 1990, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev went on television and stated that "he had no choice but to order his troops" to enter Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, in order, in the words of the BBC, "to try and end the undeclared conflict between Muslim Azeris and Christian Armenians, and put down a separatist insurrection by Azerbaijani nationalists." As many as 60 persons already had died since the tanks arrived. Azerbaijan, in orange at right, gained independence a year later; ethnic unrest lingers.

On September 8

On this day in ...

... 1998 (10 years ago today), in Phnom Penh, Cambodian security forces fired into crowds of protesters who'd been occupying a city park for 2 weeks; at least 1 was killed. Meanwhile, leader Hun Sen ordered his opponents arrested. Demonstrators objected to a "marred" parliamentary election in July, which handed victory to Hun Sen, who'd 1st become prime minister in the mid-1980s and who remains so today.

... 2000, Assistant Interior Secretary Kevin Gover, then head of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, apologized to Native Americans:

Let us begin by expressing our profound sorrow for what this agency has done in the past. Just like you, when we think of these misdeeds and their tragic consequences, our hearts break and our grief is as pure and complete as yours. We desperately wish that we could change this history, but of course we cannot.
On behalf of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, I extend this formal apology to Indian people for the historical conduct of this agency. And while the BIA employees of today did not commit these wrongs, we acknowledge that the institution we serve did. We accept this inheritance, this legacy of racism and inhumanity. And by accepting this legacy, we accept also the moral responsibility of putting things right.

(Full statement here.) Gover, a member of the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma who's now a law professor at Arizona State University, took pains to explain he was speaking only for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and not for the entire United States.
Just this year, 2 other countries have extended apologies to their indigenous citizens. In February Australia apologized to its aboriginal peoples. And as foreshadowed in our post on that event, in June Canada apologized to its First Nations for its state policy of assimilating children by sending them to boarding schools where their cultures were erased and where many suffered abuse. (credit for 1930 archival photo of 1 Inuit and 2 Métis girls, students at the All Saints residential school in Shingle Point, Yukon, Canada)

On May 29

On this day in ...
... 2007, in Bermuda, Dame Lois Browne-Evans (right), "a pioneer in many fields," died from a stroke 3 days short of her 80th birthday. In 1953, Browne-Evans became the 1st woman called to the bar of the island state. She became the 1st black woman to be elected a Member of Bermuda's Parliament " in the history-making 1963 election, in which adults who did not own property received the right to vote for the first time." In 1968, she became the 1st woman to lead an opposition party anywhere in the British Commonwealth; 30 years after that, she was named Bermuda's 1st woman Attorney General. "Her career," the Bermuda Sun wrote at the time of her death, "was defined by one in which she championed the rights of black and working-class Bermudians, who stood on the margins of power, back in the 50s and 60s."
... 1677, Cockacoesk, the weroansqua, or female ruler, of the Pamunkey tribe, and her son called "Captain John West," the weroance, or male ruler, of the Nansemond, signed The Treaty of Middle Plantation, referring to what is now Williamsburg, Virginia, part of the Chesapeake Bay area shown at left. By this treaty certain Native Americans -- "the Powhatan captives" -- held captive by English settlers were to be returned to their tribes. "Because this treaty is still in force, the Pamunkey and Mattaponi still pay "tribute" of game to the governor of Virginia each autumn."

On May 8

On this day in ...
... 1901, the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, or Human Rights League, was founded in Belgium. It followed by 3 years the establishment of a similar league in France. According to its website, the Ligue (logo at left) "continues its daily efforts to keep watch over the protection of fundamental rights in Belgium's French community."
... 1973 (35 years ago today), "[a]fter 70 days, two deaths, numerous injuries, countless meetings, bureaucratic bickering and a last-minute gunfight, more than 100 militants lay down their arms and surrendered this occupied reservation town to wary Federal officials" at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Thus ended a siege by Native Americans at the town on the Pine Ridge Reservation where the U.S. Army had massacred Sioux in 1890. Serving as a medic during the 1973 occupation was Madonna Thunder Hawk (right), who described her experience here.

On December 22, ...

... 2007 (today), at 1:08 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, begins the Northern Hemisphere's Winter Solstice. At dawn, light seeps into a specially made, 5,000-year-old chamber at Newgrange, Ireland. For 14 minutes the shaft of light illuminates stone carvings like that at left. Then it disappears for another year.
... 1812 (195 years ago today), at age 25, the Native American woman who guided Lewis & Clark through the American West, Sacagawea, died after giving birth to her 2d child at at Fort Manuel, fur-trading post in what is now South Dakota. With her was Toussaint Charbonneau, the French-Canadian soldier to whom she was sold as a slave, at about age 12, and claimed as wife. Selling her was a band of Indians who had kidnapped her from her people, the Shoshones. She is inspiration to IntLawGrrls' Kristine A. Huskey.

On October 21, ...

... 1977 (30 years ago today) , a regulation of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation entered into force, thus establishing the European Patent Institute, designed to promote the work of the Organisation and compliance with its rules among professionals in the patent industry. Today the Institute, based in Munich, Germany, comprises 8,700 members in 32 European countries.
... 1867 (140 years ago today), 2 peoples indigenous the United States' Great Plains, the Kiowa and Comanche, signed with the United States an accord called the Medicine Lodge Treaty (right). Other tribes added their signatures within days. An Oklahoma museum site portrays the pact as the end of native sovereignty in the region:

The Medicine Lodge Treaty did not end all the fighting. But it is known as the most important treaty signed on the Southern Plains. The Indians gave up their hunting grounds and their nomadic, carefree way of life. Some lived through the fighting and accepted life on the reservation. Others died for what they believed in.

In stark contrast, a Library of Congress site stresses promises of peace in the treaty, and adds:

Today, the treaty is celebrated every three years with a colorful outdoor pageant re-enacting the events that led to the signing at the place where the Medicine River and Elm Creek meet on the Kansas prairie, now designated Memorial Peace Park. Events also include an Intertribal Powwow featuring Native American dance competitions, crafts, and food booths.