Native Proposes Reservation Business
From the halls and classrooms of urban academia, one Native American is touting a plan that could make it possible for people to stay on rural reservations and earn a fairly decent living, an opportunity that’s sometimes been elusive.
Calvin C. Pohawpatchoko Jr., a member of the Comanche Nation, is a Ph.D. candidate in an interdisciplinary program in technology, media and society at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He supports insourcing call or data centers that can be based at a distance from their customers (compared to outsourcing to India, the Philippines, or other places).
The idea is not without drawbacks—for cost-conscious business leaders, services abroad might still be cheaper in terms of educated workers commanding relatively low wages in unregulated working conditions, but in America’s job-starved economy insourced call or data centers might provide social capital.
Call centers involve employees who seem to belong to a computer firm, for example, as they respond to questions from callers, but generally they are employees of the call center. Data centers, sometimes combined with call centers, store data for others, as in digitizing data for states and the transportation industry as part of a growing global field.
Pohawpatchoko says educated workers are a critical component for reservation-based business, so ventures near tribal colleges or universities might be a place to start. He notes that in South America, for example, “it’s the role of universities” to create economic skills and economic stability in the area.
One challenge for Indian America is that more than 50 percent of Native American students drop out of school before they graduate, 20 percent may go to college but only half graduate, so “we may be left with 10 percent actually graduating from college,” he notes.
Other hurdles include elected tribal councils that may change every two years or so, sovereignty issues that could discourage outside investment, and lack of funds for needed infrastructure, he said.
Some reservations have already taken the plunge into call and data systems, a field which Powhawpatchoko, who worked as an employee of Electronic Data Systems has watched with interest.
Cayuse Technologies, owned by the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, offers such services as digital document processing, software development and a call center to governmental and commercial clients.
The tribally owned firm in northeastern Oregon was initiated “to diversify the local economy and to create living wage jobs that allow people of the Umatilla Reservation and surrounding rural communities the opportunity to live and work on or near the Umatilla Reservation and their homes,” reads the Cayuse website.
There are other data or call center enterprises in Indian country, one of them Lakota Technologies Inc., in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, on the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation, where jobs are scarce. The firm has 10 to 15 tribal members as employees, primarily in data conversion work and it is “an opportunity for our people economically,” said Candace Le Beaux, operations supervisor.
An umbrella organization of seven tribes and several Native nonprofits, the Intertribal Information Technology Co. LLC, was formed primarily to meet Department of Defense needs for advanced digital formats and through its Native American Document Conversion Program “has created employment for as many as 500 people in Native communities [including Eagle Butte] typically suffering 50 percent or greater unemployment.”
Pohawpatchko lauds these and other ventures: “We haven’t really grasped the idea of sovereignty itself—we still have the mindset of trying to catch up. We should always be looking forward and seeing what could be done.”
Read more:http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/02/01/native-proposes-reservation-business-95163 http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/02/01/native-proposes-reservation-business-95163#ixzz1lNVrhC00
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What does Groundhog Day have to do with Native American history?
What does Groundhog Day have to do with Native American language and history? And how did Punxsutawney Phil, the now famous groundhog millions look to for weather predictions, end up in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania?
Let’s start at the beginning.
Groundhog Day, at its most basic, is an astronomical holiday. February 2nd falls midway between the December solstice and March equinox.
“Solstices, equinoxes and seasonal midways called cross quarters were vital to ancient people for regulating their calendars and knowing when to plant, when to harvest, when to stay, when to move,” says an article about the seasons on Archaeoastronomy.com. As illustrated in the image to the left, the equinoxes and solstices are separated by 90-degree angles. The cross quarters bisect those and served as Celtic boundaries for the four seasons—Beltaine, Lughnasad, Samain and Imbolc.
Imbolc corresponds to Groundhog Day and the beginning of spring and gave way to Candlemas, its church-approved name, when clergy in Europe would bless and distribute candles marking the end of winter. People also looked to a hedgehog for its shadowy prediction.
An old English song goes like this:
If Candlemas be fair and bright,
Come, Winter, have another flight;
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
Go Winter, and come not again.
So it goes today. If Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow, it’s an omen for six more weeks of bad weather. But if the day is cloudy and he doesn’t see his shadow, it’s time for spring.
But how did Punxsutawney become Groundhog Day central? The first Europeans to settle in Pennsylvania were the Germans early in the 18th century. They found an abundance of groundhogs in the area. The creatures weren’t the hedgehogs they were used to back home, but they figured the groundhog would do.
The earliest observance of Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney was 1886 reported The Punxsutawney Spirit newspaper. The celebration moved to Gobbler’s Knob—where it’s still held—in 1887, the same year the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club was formed.
The club named Phil its furry prognosticator back in 1887, and then declared his immortality. Every summer the group feeds Phil a “magic elixir of life,” which members say extends Phil’s life by seven years.
Phil even got a movie out of his fame. In 1993, Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell starred in Groundhog Day, which wasn’t actually filmed in Punxsutawney, but in Woodstock, Illinios.
Image from YouTube user SacerdosMagnus2001
Punxsutawney is in the hills of the Appalachian Plateau and takes its name from past inhabitants. The name itself comes from the Native American word ponki for sand fly. Indians called the place Ponsutenink, “the town of the ponkis.” The area was a campsite used by Native Americans halfway between the Allegheny and Susquehanna rivers. Ponsutenink was on the Shamokin Path, the earliest known trail to the east. At various times the area was inhabited by Shawnee, Delaware, Seneca and Iroquois.
The groundhog even has Native roots. The burrowing rodent is also called a woodchuck, which according to the Cornell Chronicle, Natives once used as hides for the soles of moccasins. Even the word woodchuck has Native origins. Many sources say it came from the Algonquian word wuchak, which English colonists turned into woodchuck. The World English Dictionary says it came from the Narragansett word for woodchuck ockqutchaun and the Cree word for fisher, a member of the weasel family, otcheck.
According to Native-Langauges.org, “the Wabanaki tribes of New England and the Canadian Maritimes have a mythological woodchuck character, named Grandmother Woodchuck, who is the adoptive grandmother of their culture hero Glooskap. She is usually depicted as a wise elder whose patience and wisdom teaches lessons to the good-hearted but often impetuous Glooskap.”
Watch Phil’s prediction via live webcast starting at 6 a.m. online at VisitPA.com.
See last year’s prediction:
Punxsutawney Phil’s Inner Circle:
Groundhog Day movie trailer:
View the original article here
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