Truth out articles, a new horizon to me

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/053107A.shtml

This article can be found in the Truth Out publication found online at the site above. It is not my writing and I only share the information to stimulate our thinking and strengthen our will to survive as a people and a culture.I may or may not agree, so do not find fault for my sharing it here. Form your own opinions, I only want the Native culture to be educated and this is another way I have found to share.

Minnesota Case Fits Pattern in US Attorneys Flap
    By Tom Hamburger
    The Los Angeles Times

    Thursday 31 May 2007

A prosecutor apparently targeted for firing had supported Native American voters' rights.

    Washington - For more than 15 years, clean-cut, square-jawed Tom Heffelfinger was the embodiment of a tough Republican prosecutor. Named U.S. attorney for Minnesota in 1991, he won a series of high-profile white-collar crime and gun and explosives cases. By the time Heffelfinger resigned last year, his office had collected a string of awards and commendations from the Justice Department.

    So it came as a surprise - and something of a mystery - when he turned up on a list of U.S. attorneys who had been targeted for firing.

    Part of the reason, government documents and other evidence suggest, is that he tried to protect voting rights for Native Americans.

    At a time when GOP activists wanted U.S. attorneys to concentrate on pursuing voter fraud cases, Heffelfinger's office was expressing deep concern about the effect of a state directive that could have the effect of discouraging Indians in Minnesota from casting ballots.

    Citing requirements in a new state election law, Republican Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer directed that tribal ID cards could not be used for voter identification by Native Americans living off reservations. Heffelfinger and his staff feared that the ruling could result in discrimination against Indian voters. Many do not have driver's licenses or forms of identification other than the tribes' photo IDs.

    Kiffmeyer said she was only following the law.

    The issue was politically sensitive because the Indian vote can be pivotal in close elections in Minnesota. The Minneapolis-St. Paul area has one of the largest urban Native American populations in the United States. Its members turn out in relatively large numbers and are predominantly Democratic.

    Heffelfinger resigned last year for personal reasons and says he had no idea he was being targeted for possible firing. But his stance fits a pattern that has emerged in the cases of several U.S. attorneys fired last year in states where Republicans wanted more vigorous efforts to legally challenge questionable voters.

    Politics have always played a role at Justice and other Cabinet-level departments. But, critics say, Bush administration strategists went beyond most of their predecessors - Democratic or Republican - in seeking ways to convert control of the federal government into advantages on election day.

    And the Heffelfinger episode has contributed to a backlash among some Minnesota Republicans. Sen. Norm Coleman, a Bush loyalist in the past who is facing reelection next year, has called on Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales to resign - largely as a result of the U.S. attorney firings and the revelations about Heffelfinger.

    A hint at why Heffelfinger's name was on termination lists that Justice Department officials and Bush political strategists put together emerged when Monica M. Goodling, the department's former White House liaison, testified last week before the House Judiciary Committee about the firings.

    Goodling said she had heard Heffelfinger criticized for "spending an excessive amount of time" on Native American issues.

    Her comment caused bewilderment and anger among the former U.S. attorney's supporters in Minnesota. And Heffelfinger said it was "shameful" if the time he spent on the problems of Native Americans had landed him in trouble with his superiors in Washington.

    But newly obtained documents and interviews with government officials suggest that what displeased some of his superiors and GOP politicians was narrower and more politically charged - his actions on Indian voting.

    About three months after Heffelfinger's office raised the issue of tribal ID cards and nonreservation Indians in an October 2004 memo, his name appeared on a list of U.S. attorneys singled out for possible firing.

    "I have come to the conclusion that his expressed concern for Indian voting rights is at least part of the reason that Tom Heffelfinger was placed on the list to be fired," said Joseph D. Rich, former head of the voting section of the Justice Department's civil rights division. Rich, who retired in 2005 after 37 years as a career department lawyer - 24 of them in Republican administrations - was closely involved in the Minnesota ID issue. He played no role in drafting the termination lists, which were prepared by political appointees.

    Justice Department officials refused Tuesday to confirm whether particular U.S. attorneys may or may not have been on one of the termination lists prepared by D. Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff to Gonzales. But Dean Boyd, a department spokesman, did say that "the Justice Department and the attorney general have been and remain committed to working on issues of importance to Native Americans."

    Boyd cited cases in which Justice Department lawyers have gone to court to uphold Indian voting rights.

    Suspicion of Indian voter fraud was strong among Republicans in the upper Midwest in advance of the 2004 election. The GOP blamed what it said was fraud on Indian reservations for the narrow victory of South Dakota Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson over Republican candidate John Thune in 2002.

    It was in this environment, Rich says, that he got an Oct. 19, 2004, e-mail from an assistant U.S. attorney in Minnesota named Rob Lewis, informing him about possible voter discrimination against Indians.

    Described as a matter of "deep concern" to Heffelfinger, the issue arose from Kiffmeyer's directive in the fall of 2004 that tribal ID cards could not be used for voter identification off reservations

    About 32,000 Indians live off-reservation in Minnesota, mostly in the Twin Cities.

    In the e-mail - which Rich described to The Times - Lewis wrote that Kiffmeyer's memo had sparked "concerns regarding possible disparate impact among the state's substantial Indian population."

    "Disparate impact" is a term used in civil rights litigation to describe a circumstantial case of discrimination.

    After reviewing the matter, Rich recommended opening an investigation.

    In response, he said, Bradley Schlozman, a political appointee in the department, told Rich "not to do anything without his approval" because of the "special sensitivity of this matter."

    Rich responded by suggesting that more information be gathered from voting officials in the Twin Cities area, which includes Minnesota's two most populous counties.

    A message came back from another Republican official in the department, Hans von Spakovsky, saying Rich should not contact the county officials but should instead deal only with the secretary of state's office.

    Von Spakovsky indicated, Rich said, that working with Kiffmeyer's office reduced the likelihood of a leak to the news media.

    The orders from Schlozman and Von Spakovsky, who wielded unusual power in the civil rights division, effectively ended any department inquiry, Rich said.

    "It was apparent to me that because of these extremely tight and unusual restrictions on the investigation that this matter had political implications," Rich said in an interview.

    Rich is now working for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which was formed at the request of President Kennedy in 1963 to combat discrimination.

    Schlozman, who served briefly as U.S. attorney in Missouri and brought a voting fraud case shortly before election day last year, was not available for comment, Justice Department officials said. Von Spakovsky, now at the Federal Election Commission, said through a spokesman that he could not comment.

    Kiffmeyer also did not respond to requests for comment.

    With the Justice Department inquiry going nowhere, lawyers for the Indians asked the federal courts to intervene. A few days before the November 2004 election, federal District Judge James Rosenbaum ordered that tribal identification cards be accepted at the polls.

    After Heffelfinger resigned, the Justice Department replaced him with someone more attuned to the administration's views.

    On his way out, Heffelfinger recommended that Joan Humes, the No. 2 person in the office, be named interim U.S. attorney. But Humes was rejected by the Justice Department - in part, Goodling testified, because she was known to be a "liberal."

    The job went to a conservative Justice Department employee, Rachel Paulose. She had Ivy League credentials, brief experience as a prosecutor, and as a private lawyer had helped bring election lawsuits on behalf of the Minnesota GOP. She declined to comment for this article.

    One of Paulose's first acts in office was to remove Lewis, who had written the 2004 e-mails to Washington expressing concern about Native American voting rights in Minnesota, from overseeing voting rights cases.

    For his part, Heffelfinger said, he took Goodling at her word and believed that he was on the termination lists for his zeal in confronting problems facing Indian country. But Heffelfinger said he did not know whether voting rights in particular affected his standing with Washington.

    "I was just flagging an issue and giving an opinion," he said. "I think that's the kind of analysis a U.S. attorney is supposed to do."

 

Challenging Indian Land Trusts

Challenging Indian Land Trusts
    By Michelle Chen
    In These Times

    Monday 18 February 2008

    Across Indian country, two things are never in short supply: rich natural resources and endemic poverty. That paradox is driving a longstanding battle between indigenous people and the government trust that holds money generated from their lands.

    The class-action lawsuit, Cobell v. Kempthorne, targets a federal trust fund that handles revenues from activities like oil drilling and logging on land owned by individual Indians and tribes. The trust's financial operations-covering more than 56 million acres and dating back for more than a century-have left a spectacularly messy paper trail. Many beneficiaries say they are in the dark about how much has been paid out and what is still owed, and charge that the system has drained wealth from Indian communities.

    "We know that the government collected our money, but it hasn't been paid to us as individual Indian beneficiaries," says Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet Nation member who initiated the suit in 1996 on behalf of several hundred thousand account holders.

    The battle is finally drawing to a close. On Jan. 30, U.S. District Judge James Robertson ruled that the trust's finances are beyond salvaging. Calling for a settlement, he denounced the Interior Department's "unrepaired, and irreparable, breach of its fiduciary duty over the last century."

    The decision builds on a 1999 ruling that ordered a management overhaul and a complete accounting-to comply with the trust's orignal mandate and federal reforms enacted in 1994. As In These Times went to press, the Interior had not issued a formal legal response to the decision.

    The department has spent years retooling its accounting systems, but various court reviews found the trust in chronic disarray. Not only are financial records inaccurate or missing, critics say, but many landowners have little information on their lands and lease activities, or even the value of their assets, aside from sporadic checks issued by the government.

    The system disbursed about $300 million to individuals and $500 million to tribes last fiscal year, and holds hundreds of millions in individual-account funds.

    Whatever the exact amount that has been unpaid, Cobell says, evidence of a swindle is strewn across Blackfeet territory. Though the earth is replete with oil, timber and other resources, she says, "there is poverty all over the place."

    Around the turn of the 20th century, the government established the trust system to manage lands on behalf of Indians, based on the presumption that natives lacked the competency to control their resources. Today, the government says the trust functions primarily as an institutional conduit for land-based revenues, produced under agreements between landowners and business interests.

    But the trust looks different from Jay Dusty Bull's spread, which spans about 8,500 acres near Browning, Mont. To the 23-year-old Blackfeet member, his family's grazing leases provide a financial boost but hardly compensate for the theft his ancestors suffered.

    "A hundred years ago, were our Indians - who didn't speak English, who couldn't read or write - given that same opportunity?" he says. "No. 'Sign an X here. Here's $40.' Billions of dollars could have been taken off of our land a hundred years ago, and we don't know."

    Defending its ongoing accounting work, the Interior argued that a "statistical sampling" of records for several thousand transactions had uncovered only a small percentage of errors, and that "additional work would neither produce a better result nor be cost effective."

    But official probes haven't be so reassuring. In 2002, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth held then-Secretary Gale Norton in contempt for failing to initiate the historical accounting process years after Congress had mandated it. The Interior Department, he wrote, had "indisputably proven ... it is either unwilling or unable to administer [the trust] competently."

    Court-appointed Special Master Alan Balaran reported similarly dismal findings. Inspecting a Dallas branch of the Minerals Management Office in 2003, he noted the "chaotic" disorganization of financial documents, along with the "unexplained presence of an industrial shredder" - before office staff forced him to leave.

    Outside the courtroom, advocates have pressed Congress for legislation to completely overhaul the trust's management and accounting systems. For many landowners, balancing the government's books would be one small, overdue counterweight against a legacy of injustice.

    "We need to have a much fairer process," Dusty Bull says. "[We need to] make sure that our children, our grandchildren, our generations to come, do not have to go through the same process."

  -------

Why is Dog not dogged for insulting Natives?

TV bounty hunter Duane `Dog' Chapman apologizes for using racial slur in phone call - AOL News

 

Our country remains with the American Native at the bottom of the list, worthy of insults with no fluff.  Either way, I have turned it over to the grandmothers and grandfathers and they have dealt with him as they see fit.

 

TV bounty hunter Duane `Dog' Chapman apologizes for using racial slur in phone call

By JAYMES SONG,

AP

Posted: 2007-11-01 13:27:35

HONOLULU (AP) - Television bounty hunter Duane "Dog" Chapman has apologized for repeatedly using a racial slur in a profanity-laced tirade during a private phone conversation with his son that was recorded and posted online.

Chapman, star of A&E's hit reality series "Dog the Bounty Hunter," issued a statement Wednesday apologizing for the comments after The National Enquirer posted a clip of the conversation in which he uses the word "n----r" in reference to his son's girlfriend. The word is frequently referred to as the "N-word" because of its painful history as a racist epithet associated with slavery in America.

"We take this matter very seriously," A&E spokesman Michael Feeney said in a statement Thursday. "Pending an investigation, we have suspended production on the series. When the inquiry is concluded, we will take appropriate action."

The recording was first posted online by the Enquirer. It was unclear who recorded the conversation or how the tabloid obtained the 1 1/2-minute clip in which Chapman uses the slur six times.

"There's no problem with how the tape was obtained and Dog has acknowledged its authenticity, and admitted to using the racist language," said David Perel, the Enquirer's editor-in-chief.

In the conversation, Chapman urges his son, Tucker, to break up with his girlfriend. He also expresses concern about the girlfriend going public about the TV star's use of the word.

In the clip, Chapman also stated he does not care that his son's girlfriend is black.

In a statement, the 54-year-old Chapman said he has "utmost respect and aloha for black people who have suffered so much due to racial discrimination and acts of hatred.

"I did not mean to add yet another slap in the face to an entire race of people who have brought so many gifts to this world," he said. "I am ashamed of myself and I pledge to do whatever I can to repair this damage I have caused."

Chapman said, "My sincerest, heartfelt apologies go out to every person I have offended for my regrettable use of very inappropriate language. I am deeply disappointed in myself for speaking out of anger to my son and using such a hateful term in a private phone conversation."

Chapman said the clip was completely taken out of context.

"I was disappointed in his choice of a friend, not due to her race, but her character," he said. "However, I should have never used that term."

Chapman said he is meeting with his spiritual adviser, Rev. Tim Storey, who is black, and hopes to meet with other black leaders, "so they can see who I really am and teach me the right thing to do to make things right, again."

Civil-rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton is among the leaders Chapman contacted. In a letter Thursday to the bounty hunter, Sharpton wrote that as a minister, he would be inclined to meet "despite the racist and grotesque things I heard you say."

"Be assured that I will not sanitize the kind of hate language that leads to the hate action that has left so many people vulnerable in America today," Sharpton wrote.

Chapman's show was in its fifth season and is one of A&E's top-rated programs. The series follows Chapman and his tattooed crew as they track down bail jumpers in Hawaii and other states.

The Honolulu-based bounty hunter first grabbed headlines for apprehending serial rapist and Max Factor heir Andrew Luster in Mexico in 2003.

On the Net:

A&E:

http://www.aetv.com/

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. Active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.

11/01/07 13:26 EDT

Dog was a bounty hunter, now we are hunting him

To all my sisters, brothers, fathers and mothers, to all my grandmothers and grandfathers here to be and those who were, I lay this outrage before you as I have copied from my sisters site "Native American Moments" and ask that the Great Spirit and Mother Earth let this man now reap what he has so foolishly sownd

To the Spirits of the East, I honor you. To the spirits of the North, I honor you. To the spirits of the south I honor you. And to the spirits of the west, I honor you and ask that the sun may not set and the full moon rise and pass again that Dogs transgressions be avenged in your own way, in your own time.

To Father Sky and Mother Earth I honor you and to the wind that bnrings the breath of life or the winds of destruction, and to the water springs that bring the force of all life, I give this man and his transgressions to you.

NEWS ON DOG THE BOUNTY HUNTER

Don’t know if any of you are fans if this side walk commando Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman. I’m not since I already know too much about this puke from Denver as it is. Being a former bail bondsman and did my share of “collecting” in my day, I found his show quite annoying to say the least.

Imagine walking into a church and pissing on the Holy Cross thendisrespecting the preacher in front of his parish. Well that’s liken to what he did at a Pow Wow in Hawaii. I am making sure everyone has a chance to read this accounting of his lack luster performance in front of hundreds of Natives in Hawaii. And I will bet he thinks this would not get off the island. Well, power to the internet since I have the story here. And since I do not believe in re-inventing the wheel I am re-printing this story in it’s entirety and giving credit to the author who originally broke this story. So now he's also a low life creep. Course I always thought he was anyway.

The only suggestion I would offer those who are as enraged about this punk of a person is to hit him in his pocket book. Contact A&E, the station his lame and foolish show airs. Let him know his ego cost him his job. To boycott or cast a negative light on anyone who airs his smack may cause the ones who sign his check to throw him in the rubbish where he belongs. Protest any sponsors who advertise when his show airs. Let them know this conduct is not acceptable and will not be tolerated by Native and non Native people here in the US and where else his stupid show airs. Hit Duane “Puppy” Chapman in his wallet.

From: WEST WIND DANCER
Date: Oct 28, 2007 12:18 PM


Duane Chapman, aka "Dog the Bounty Hunter", recently made atestosterone-induced appearance at the Hawaii Pow Wow. He spoke highly  of his career, and mentioned his native ancestry. However, in the end, his actions brought shame to the sacred drum and anger to hundreds of local elders.

Red Warrior, a southern drummer, who hails from San Diego, was singing a song in honor for all Code Talkers (Native American War Veterans and non-native veterans whom were honored by the military, in WWII) Then "The Dog's" youngest son picked up a drum stick and began uncontrollably beating the drum next to Red Warrior. The remainder of the honor-song was interrupted by the teen celebrity's mock drumming.

At the conclusion of the performance, Red Warrior asked "Whose kid was interrupting the song?" The Dog replied, "You don't talk to the boy, you talk to the man!...I am the Dog. Do you want a piece of the Dog?"

Shocked and appalled at the bounty hunters disrespect, the drummers looked at each other in disbelief. "The Dog" began to call on the drum's veteran singers to stand up and challenge him. Dog became furious and began to swear at the drummers. "Do you want some of the Dog?"

A drummer placed his drumstick onto the drum, approached The Dog and said "Yes, I will have a piece of the Dog,”

Outside of the arena, The Dog and the disgruntled drummer stood face to face. "Lets go to the side and take care of this like men.", as The Dog challenged the old indian

"No, we're going to take care of this in front of everybody. I'm not afraid of you." The veteran drummer spoke loud and clear.

The Dog persisted, "You're sitting with nothing but bitches here."

"How could you talk to your elders like that?"

The Dog barked, "As far as I'm concerned, they're nothing but pussies!"

The Dog walked off and challenged the drummer to "settle this like men."

The drummer replied, "We'll do this in front of everyone.". At which point Chapman’s harsh criticisms and vulgarities echoed throughout the parking lot.
The drummer was steadfast, "You're supposed to be a movie star, 'The Dog,' but you are nobody. You have brought shame to the drum."

Duane "The Dog" Chapman has disappointed and enraged the Native American community with his behavior, and insensitivity toward our fathers & grandfathers. Behavior of this type may be tolerable onTV shows but will not be tolerated at any Native American Pow Wow.

I hope you are as pissed as I am. It is bad enough there is little respect for Indigenous cultures world wide. This is a total out rage. Like I said, we should send a message to all advertisers and A&E letting them know, Dog has to go. And we the people have the power to alter his course in history and career. Don Imus paid the ultimate price for a similar transgression. So what’s good for the goose is good for the gander eh.

BOYCOT DOG, BOYCOT HIS SPONCERS, BOYCOT A&E



Your Devils Advocate
Buffalohair