Johnson this spring ruled in favor of the Indian plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit against the county in 2005. Johnson agreed that the county’s long-standing system of at-large voting system violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the Indian vote. In response to Johnson’s ruling, Fremont County had proposed two similar voting plans. Both the county’s proposals called for designating a single commission district in which Native Americans would be the majority while continuing with forms of at-large voting in the rest of the county.

Johnson’s order prohibits the county from using at-large voting to elect commissioners in the future. Instead, he adopted a plan proposed by the plaintiffs that divides the county into five districts of roughly equal population, including one district that will have mainly Indians in it. Johnson ordered the county to use those districts for a special commissioner election this year and for regular elections after that.

“The plans proposed by defendants perpetuate the separation, isolation and racial polarization in the county, guaranteeing that the non-Indian majority continues to cancel out the voting strength of the minority,” Johnson wrote.

“The (county’s) plans appear to be devised solely for the purpose of segregating citizens into separate voting districts on the basis of race without sufficient justification, contrary to the defendants’ assertions.”

Laughlin McDonald, head of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project in Atlanta, has represented the Indian plaintiffs together with Lander lawyers Andrew Baldwin and Berthenia Crocker. “It’s great for the plaintiffs,” McDonald said Tuesday of Johnson’s ruling. “And it’s also, I think, great for all the voters in Fremont County, because it will allow everybody to participate.”

McDonald said the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that courts should create single-member districts to address such violations of the Voting Rights Act unless there’s some defensible reason not to do so. McDonald said the high court has ruled that single-member districts decrease voter confusion and increase the opportunity for political participation.

Douglas L. Thompson, chairman of the Fremont County Commission, said Tuesday he and other commissioners were greatly disappointed with Johnson’s decision.
“We need to evaluate the decision and our options at this point,” Thompson said. The court-ordered plan is going to require a great deal of work by the County Clerk’s Office before any election can be held, Thompson said. It may prove to be impossible to hold a special commission election in time to seat the new commissioners before current terms expire in early January, he said.

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Smith explores the issue using a hypothetical scenario that involves female tribal workers being victims of sexual harassment. He looks at how, because the tribe has not enacted laws pertaining to sexual harassment and, thus, the victims can not get justice through the tribal court, the door opens wide for union organization.

With the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in San Manuel Indian Bingo & Casino v. NLRB, tribal gaming operations are already open to National Labor Relations Board jurisdiction, as Smith noted. Smith said tribes have two options: do nothing or enact their own laws.

“The threat of federal authority over labor relations in Indian country is a threat of assimilation,” Smith wrote. “In the case of the NLRB, outside federal agents would impose labor unions upon tribes, upholding the power of such unions to bargain for externally defined ‘rights’ of employees and to strike against tribes’ economic enterprises – even to thwart tribal employment preferences.

Click here to read Smith’s column.

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Buried in the billions of dollars of spending on new weapons and other items in the 2010 defense appropriations bill is a little-noticed expression of regret over how the U.S. had in the past used its power.

The bill contains an “apology to Native Peoples of the United States.”

The multi-year effort to pass the language was bipartisan: Sens. Sam Brownback (R., Kan.) and Byron Dorgan (D., N.D.) led the campaign, which began in 2004. President Barack Obama signed the language, apparently the first official apology to native americans, into law on Monday.

Congress has previously approved apologies to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II, and to native Hawaiians for the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The House and Senate recently have passed different resolutions apologizing for slavery in the U.S.

The just-approved language says, in part, that “the United States, acting through Congress…recognizes that there have been years of official depredations, ill-conceived policies, and the breaking of covenants by the Federal Government regarding indian tribes.”

The U.S. “apologizes on behalf of the people of the United States to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States,” the statement says, adding that it is committed “to move toward a brighter future where all the people of this land live reconciled as brothers and sisters, and harmoniously steward and protect this land together.”

The statement adds, however, that it isn’t intended to support any lawsuit claims against the government (and there are still plenty).Comment:  So far I think this is the only article reporting on the long-awaited apology. Burying it in the defense appropriations bill has rendered it inconsequential if not invisible. This must be one of the least heralded apologies from a government to its people in history.

For more on the US apology, see Trying Again for US Apology and Apology Would Be Inspiring. For other nations’ apologies, see Canada Says It’s Sorry and Australia Apologizes to Aborigines.

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Finally, the department will set aside $60 million in a Fund for American Indians wishing to pursue post-secondary vocational education or a higher education.

At the Fund, we could not be more thrilled. This means a chance for many more American Indian people to earn a higher education and brings hope for them for a better future.

To read details of the settlement visit Cobell v. Salazar.

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The AP report said that the land was part of the tribe’s original reservation established in an 1868 treaty, and was at first held in trust. But over time, it was allotted to individual tribal members and was later sold to non-indians. The Crow Creek purchased it again in 1998, but the land never went back into trust, leaving it open to seizure.

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The team started using the Redskins name in 1933; and the trademark was first issued in 1967. The native american group filed its lawsuit in 1992.

The Supreme Court’s decision lets stand a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that the activists waited too long to challenge the trademark.

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President Obama signed Senate Bill 39 into law, permanently rescinding the “Bennett Freeze” and ending more than 40 years of restrictions for Navajo Nation residents living on 1.6 million acres in the western portion of the Navajo Nation.

The freeze, which was imposed July 8, 1966, by then-Department of the Interior Secretary Robert Bennett, resulted from a decades-long land dispute between the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe and prevented residents from making improvements or repairs to their homes and related property.

Only 3 percent of families affected by the Bennett Freeze have electricity and only 10 percent have running water.

Update:
Tuba City, December 5th, 09
Imagine not being allowed to improve your home, make repairs or build a new one — that is the plight of those who live in the Bennett Freeze.

Just south of Tuba City, where the pavement ends and the dirt roads begin, is an area known as “No Man’s Land.” Residents say it’s part of the former Bennett Freeze, but nobody really knows for sure. It’s on the fringe and the Bennett Freeze happened a long time ago.

All they know is life is a struggle and help is basically non-existent.

Denise Almeida, 35, lives with her boyfriend and seven children in a 7-by-19-foot travel trailer on the family compound. Her mother and father reside in a two-room house in the middle. Denise’s sister, Stevena, and her family live in a thin plywood hogan on the other side.

“We had a trailer here, a single-wide, and it burnt down. We don’t have any way of like, getting a hogan done for us, so we’ve been in this trailer for almost three years,” Denise said.

An orange extension cord runs from her parents’ home to the trailer, providing electricity for a dorm-room-size refrigerator, a small heater, and occasional television for the kids. The roof of the trailer is covered in multiple tarps to try to keep out the rain. The windows were broken out by a tornado that touched down in 2007 and are draped in blankets or other material.

“The last wood stove I had burned down my trailer, so I’m scared of wood stoves and I’m scared of propane,” Denise said. The electric heater doesn’t produce much heat, so the trailer stays cold in winter.

“Sometimes when it rains really hard, it leaks from the ceiling. The walls are really bad. You can hear the mouses running around in there. My kids got sick from the mouse droppings. They all have asthma,” she said.

At night, Denise’s boyfriend, Edward Zepeda, sleeps on the floor, she sleeps in a twin bed with the babies – Leon and Leticia. The boys sleep on the bunk beds and on the floor. “Actually, when it’s warm enough out here, my daughter sleeps outside in ‘the Blazer’ because it’s too crowed inside, or sometimes she stays over at my mom’s house,” Denise said.

When Stevena and Brian moved to the family compound, their sons, Brandon, 2, and, Jayden, who turned a year old Nov. 28, hadn’t been born yet.

“Before I got pregnant we used to live in my mom’s Blazer. We stayed there for maybe like two months. It was getting to the winter. It was really cold.”

They moved into a rat-infested trailer on the family compound. “It was really bad. The ceiling was dripping all the time, there was mouses in there. We had to use the outhouse. I started getting sick and getting infections,” Stevena said. One morning she went to the outhouse and when she came back “she was feeling really weird,” Brian said. “We took her to the hospital and the doctor said it was a black widow bite.

“When we lived in that little trailer we used to have mice all the time. We’d get that sticky paper and we’d get like two or three a night,” he said.

“Even where we laid, there were mouses going on top of us and around us. It was kind of gross,” Stevena added.

The “Blazer,” which really isn’t a Blazer but a similar-style vehicle, might not have been much, but at least it was mouse-free. After Brandon was born, they slept there. “We’d just throw our blankets down and put him in the middle,” Brian said.

That was in the winter, while Stevena’s dad was repairing a hogan that had been damaged by fire so they would have a home. “It was burned from the stove all the way down to the door. The walls were kind of apart and it looked bad,” she said.

Though there is a Navajo taboo against living in burned-out structures, “We had no choice because we had nowhere else to live. My dad wanted some sort of shelter for my son. I was happy that he was building this. We don’t have no mice, but we do have a lot of bugs in here,” she said. They fixed that by taping all the seams where the walls and ceiling come together with red plastic tape.

Like Denise’s trailer, the hogan is powered by an extension cord running from Stevena’s parents’ house.

“It’s hard to live like this because sometimes we have to use electricity and then sometimes extension cords burn out and it’s hard for us to get extension cords to have lights.”

Neither Denise nor Stevena have running water, so cooking and bathing takes place at their parents’ house. The water heater tore up a couple years ago, Stevena said, so there is no hot water.

“We have to take turns at the stove and sometimes my mom runs out of propane and we end up using a small electric stove to cook on. Only one burner works so we all have to take turns cooking at different hours,” Denise said.

Her boyfriend has only been able to find work one day a week. The family basically subsists on just over $300 a month from TANF and Food Stamps.

Despite the hardships, Denise said her children are doing well in school, except for Misael, who contracted Helicobacter Pyhri, a bacterlogical disease better known as H. pylori. He spent two months in the hospital last winter, which put him behind in his school work, and now will have to take medication every day for the rest of his life.

“My doctor wrote out a paper saying that we needed better housing than this, so we’ve been waiting all this time. We went to the chapter and to the housing authority,” she said. After the trailer burned, she even put up fliers at the grocery store, “trying to find a trailer for cheap,” but no one responded.

“I wouldn’t really call this a home,” Denise said. “I guess I got used to it, the way we live and everything, but it’s not a good situation for my kids.

“As soon as they get back from school they have to do their homework. I don’t allow them to do their homework late because we don’t really want to use up the lights,” she said. Her daughter, Elisa, 19, is trying to get into college, and Denise herself is getting together her high school records so she can enroll in adult education classes. Stevena and Brian already are taking classes.

Living in such tight quarters takes its toll. She suffers from migraines and asthma. “I feel so choked sometimes. It feels like I can’t breathe. I can’t move around. We try to do our best, but it seems like it’s just getting worse and worse.”

After the trailer burned, she went to the chapter for help. The woman who waited on her “turned around and told me the reason why the trailer burnt down is because there was illegal stuff in there. I said, ‘The only thing you guys found supposedly illegal in there is the syringes I use to give myself a shot for migraines.’

“It made me so mad, because they don’t know nothing about us. They just figure, ‘Well, that’s what they were doing. We’re not going to help them.’ The only time people came around here to check on us was when that twister came. But we didn’t get help from any of those people. They just took pictures and then they left.”

When Misael was sick and in the hospital a lady from school came by to check on him. After seeing the living conditions, she said she was going to report them to Social Services. “This living condition is no good for your kids. They need a better life,” Denise said she was told.

“I went up to that lady and I said, ‘You know what, just because maybe you have a better living situation than us, that’s no reason. At least I’m here for my kids. They’re in school every day, they’re not being abused. That doesn’t make me a bad parent.’

“I hate it when people come around and they think they’re better than other people. That’s what I told her. She said, ‘Well, you need to get help. You need a better living situation.’ I said, ‘Well, help me then. If you guys are concerned about it, help me.’ That’s what I told her.”

Of the most important information to me are the proposed changes in the Trust Administration processes.  The paternal government policy which simply says we must care for you because you can not care for yourself.  How about a plan to begin moving all of these contracts, agreements, funds, and resources back to their owners.

Now, don’t take this suggestion as a position to abandon tribes with a mountain of paperwork, outstanding notes payable, and unrealistic return of allocations from the Federal Bureaucracy.

Take this comment as an indication that many intelligent and professional NDNs are available to preform all of the necessary duties to administer there accounts.  Likewise, the accounts belong to individuals, maybe each of those individuals want to manage their own account.  They can buy a ShareBuilder, or eTrade account and manage their money, but the federal government says–implicitly and explicitly–by this policy the same individual is incapable of managing their funds.  

Now, I will be the first to say, that a fast dumping of this responsibility by the federal government will BRING the vultures to NDN country trying to pull a fast profit VIA a unfair trade.  These people are everywhere, doing the same to NDN country and all Americans given an opportunity to do so.  Much research about this is done by First Nations Development Institute  Although, this alone does not make the Feds a better keeper of NDN assets.

Just some food for thought about Trust Responsibility.

First, if we look back to federal policy and how NDNs have been treated by the US federal government, and other NDNs working for the US federal government, we can see some concerns.  A group of us refer to those old and new NDNs working for the federal government, as “Hang Around The Fort Indians.”  this reference in time and place reminds many in NDN country of the stories of NDN country settlement by some European groups which felt conquest and elimination or termination were the best policies.  They built Military forts, and often took advantage of NDNs who where disbanded from tribes or had problems with alcohol, in order to gain superior position on their continued efforts to eliminate Tribes.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the economic consequences of this reluctance has negative consequences on Tribes.  The consequences I previously mentioned are similar to the buying local effects of self-sufficiency. Bottom line for that argument is that you lose by paying higher prices, and efficiencies from comparative advantage.

What me and my friend came up additional is that the Tribe will eventually hire the necessary expertise from either a non-native or an NDN from another community.  When doing so it may be important to note that the importation of labor may have a premium attached to its cost.  This premium, if it exists, likely occurs for two reasons; one is that the import sees the rural locations of Tribes as a inherent problem and incorporates a labor premium to cover the cost of relocation (either to the job or from the job or both) while many young NDN men and woman who have not been home since their high school days would love to return to their community at a fair market value, primarily due to the long history and connection with the community; second, is the simple fact that employees in the information age quickly recognize trends.  The current employment trend suggests that the average employee has 3 careers during their life, and the rural and limited economies around the reservation suggest that informed and professional labor will also recognize the limited opportunity to move easily from one job to the next, if any situation would require it, and therefore, incorporate a labor premium (inclusive or exclusive of the aforementioned premium).

Considering this post, I ask for Tribal Leaders to begin to think more progressively about how to attract talented young NDN professional back into NDN country for employment.  The obvious intrinsic value is a preservation of community.

First, I am a big supporter of Economic Growth in NDN country.  I have committed my time, money, labor, and now all of the above, to pursue more education in order to assist NDN communities in building sustainable and developing economies.

A few other posts I have made relevant to this topic are HERE.

What is CRITICAL in Tracey’s article is the many hats today’s Tribal Leaders are required to have and use on any given day to conduct business in a manner which increases the welfare of NDNs.

What I think needs to be discussed further is the decision making process.  Any leader (politician) is only as good as the information they receive.  Therefore, I feel the best way for Tribal Leaders to accomplish the goal of improving the lives of the people in the NDN community is by implementing great process which develop the best information for the decisions, not only for the Leaders (politicians) but also for Department managers.

Success comes from making more good decisions than bad decisions.  Good processes reduce the number of bad decisions to choose from, so, if you have a process which only leaves managers or politicians with good decisions or better decisions, then you will only find decisions being made which improve social welfare for NDN people.

So the real question now, is How?  Well the answer to that question will vary with each communities priorities, but generally will include benefit/cost analysis, and other decision models.  So, if you are reading this post, maybe it is time to ask your leaders or yourself if your How your Tribe makes decisions.