National Native American Responsible Fatherhood Day

To honor the past we must improve upon the present! This is the philosophy of the Native American Fatherhood and Families Association (NAFFA) who was recently awarded a cooperative agreement from the Administration for Native Americans to conduct a National Outreach campaign focused on promoting the importance of fatherhood in Native communities.  NAFFA also believes fathers are the solution to addressing the problems faced by Native communities, that they are the greatest untapped resources, and that fathers must take the lead in keeping families together. 

The Administration for Native Americans supports NAFFA’s philosophy and believes the capacity to be a responsible mother or father is formed over a lifetime.  ANA continues to support community based approaches to strengthening families and Native Nations that allow for mothers and fathers to succeed as parents and providers for future generations.

In partnership with the Native American Fatherhood and Families Association (NAFFA), the Administration for Native Americans is conducting a National Native American Responsible Fatherhood Day on Saturday, June 15, 2013 to honor the role that fathers play in the daily lives of their children, their families, and their communities.  The theme of this event is “Fathers Sound the War Cry – Keep Families Together”. ANA along with NAFFA would like to strongly encourage all Native communities throughout the United States, including American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands to organize events on this day to celebrate and promote Fatherhood. 

Below are some ideas you can do in your community to participate in the National Native American Responsible Fatherhood Day:

·       Encourage Tribal leaders to acknowledge the National Native American Responsible Fatherhood Day with an official endorsement, announcement or declaration.

·         Organize community events or activities such as a seminar or gathering in your community focused on responsible fatherhood.  Invite appropriate speakers such as an Elder father to address the community.  Plan cultural and traditional activities for youth, Elders, and parents that educate, as well as, entertain and bring the parents and children together.  Examples include: storytelling, lessons on traditional family and culture, etc.

·         Invite local business organizations, merchants or other interested groups to sponsor activities or partner in events for National Native American Responsible Fatherhood Day.

·         Ask members of the local media (newspaper, radio, television) to help promote National Native American Responsible Fatherhood Day.

·         Conduct a Family Game Night with Parents and their children.  Ask the children for nominations for the Best Parent Award.  

·         Organize community storytelling sessions about the importance of Fathers or Mothers and allow fathers or mothers to share stories of their childhood and their children.

·         Organize a Father’s picnic and provide activities that show the importance of Fathers’ Involvement.   Invite children to attend and participate.

·         Partner with community schools, including Head Start and Child Care, to implement a Parent-Teacher night promoting Parents involvement in their children’s education.

·         Conduct a camping trip for parents and their children. Include campfire stories, smores, and other camping activities that provide children the opportunity to interact with their parents.  You can also conduct camping trips for fathers and sons/daughters or mothers and sons/daughters. 

·         Implement a poster contest titled “What I like best about my Dad” and award prizes for age categories.

·         Conduct a Father and Child Feast.  Provide cultural activities to bring the fathers and children together to promote the special bond fathers and children have. This can include drumming, singing, storytelling, and other traditional teachings on the value of family. 

Please get involved in this important outreach campaign. For additional information on this event, please contact Elvira James at the Native American Fatherhood and Families Association at 480-833-5007.  You may also go to the following link for additional information on this event and their outreach campaign: http://aznaffa.org/nnafi.html.

Erdrich Sisters presentation coming to Twin Towns - The Daily News: News

Erdrich Sisters presentation coming to Twin Towns - The Daily News: News

Woven With Our Roots (event/arts)

Basket Weaving Retreat / Applications due 4.1

The Native Women's Collective with support from the Seventh Generation Fund is pleased to announce a call for participants for the Woven With Our Roots € ¦’¶ Basket Weaving Retreat. This retreat is an opportunity to come together for a concentrated and dedicated study of the traditional art of basket weaving. Instruction will be provided in beginning weaving, however, weavers of all skill levels are encouraged to attend. Beginning weaving instruction will be provided by Kateri Masten.

The retreat will begin on Friday May 24 and end on Monday May 27. The retreat will provide 3 full days of basket weaving over the weekend. The retreat will begin on Friday at 3 p.m. and end on Monday at 3 p.m. The schedule will include instruction on weaving, training on identifying, processing, using, and storing materials, and an opportunity to share experiences about the importance of this continuing tradition.

Applications will be reviewed by the NWC and notifications sent to applicants interested in participating in the workshop. Download the form and return it via email or post. Click on "Download File" to get started! Please note that space is limited.

We plan to provide all meals for participants during the retreat. We also plan to provide materials for weaving. We can also provide limited lodging/ camping for retreat participants, although it is not required as part of your participation.

Applications must be postmarked or emailed by April 1, 2013. You can mail applications to PO Box 929 Arcata, CA 95518 or email nwc @ nativewomenscollective.org (take out spaces). We will notify participants by April 25, 2013 and send a finalized schedule, directions and list of things to bring for the retreat.

More information and a downloadable application form can be found on this page:
<http://www.nativewomenscollective.org/woven-with-our-roots---basket-weaving-retreat-2013.html>

Tsalgi Game (language)

Cherokee Language video game released

March 27, 2013

Main character Cecil meets his love interest Cindy for the first time in a new video game by Thornton Media designed to help people learn the Cherokee langguage. (Image courtesy of Thornton Media)

Imagine making language learning as much fun as a game –because it is a game – all in order to increase learning speed and retention well beyond the capabilities of any product in today’s market. That’s what Las Vegas-based startup Talking Games has set out to do. Founded by indigenous language learning veteran and Thornton Media President Don Thornton, a Cherokee Nation citizen, Talking Games is the first company to bring immersive virtual game environments to the consumer language-learning market.

Talking Games announced its Kickstarter campaign recently at the local hub for technology startups, the VegasTech Jelly, with a presentation in February in Downtown Las Vegas. The 40-day campaign will run until April 19.

Access full article below: 

http://theonefeather.com/2013/03/cherokee-language-video-game-released/

Portraits of vanished Indian life (arts history)

Portraits of vanished Indian life

Whether candid or staged, rare 19th-century images offer insight into a fading America

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/03/portraits-of-vanished-indian-life/

In 1879, three years after Gen. George Armstrong Custer died in battle at the Little Bighorn, Harvard purchased two albums of photographsthat included rare images of an American Indian world that was even then vanishing rapidly.

Assembled by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1877, these two volumes were intended to partially document the Indians of North America since the 1850s. Among the 1,005 images are photos of costumes, crafts, and dwellings — but especially of warriors, wives, maidens, children, and chiefs.

In an email, Castle McLaughlin, associate curator of North American ethnography at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, called the photos of the chiefs “very rare and in most cases virtually unique images of some of the most important Plains leaders of their day.”

“These albums constitute important primary-source materials,” Robert Burton, Harvard Library cataloger for photographs, said in an email. From his post at the Weissman Preservation Center, he rewrote the albums’ original descriptions from 1879, which were scant and incomplete.

Burton said the albums’ images support the idea of “the white man’s Indian,” a concept explored in historian Robert F. Berkhofer Jr.’s 1979 book of the same title. Under that explanation, white racism is evident in the doubleness of Indian portrayals going back to the days of Columbus. Depicted are only noble savages or bloodthirsty heathens. The first seem worthy of submission; the second require submission.

Photographs have been mounted in albums since the 1840s, said Burton, and Harvard collections include many such holdings of “scientific, expeditionary, or ethnographic photographs.” Since many other collections have been lost or little studied, Burton said that makes the Harvard albums important to historians.

Captive Bannocks, Camp Brown, Wyoming Territory, October 1878. Disaffected, they had escaped from a reservation in Idaho and were captured by Shoshones cooperating with federal soldiers. Their names are emblematic of cultural transition: Frank (from top left to bottom right), Dick, Na-Pe-Oho, Wigwam, Joe, Wasta-Wana (Indian Tom), Markomah, and John. Sequence 234, Vol. 2.

“Faithful sun pictures”

The albums came from one part of the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, a report of four Lewis and Clark-like expeditions undertaken from 1860 to 1878. The limited-edition volumes were compiled on orders from survey leader Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, a physician turned geologist whose energetic ways earned him the Indian name Man Who Picks Up Stones Running.

In a prefatory note to the albums, Hayden called the images “faithful sun pictures” of 25 tribes over 25 years, and he mourned their loss and alteration to the reservation system. “The value of such a graphic record of the past increases year by year,” he presciently wrote.

About a fifth of the album photographs were drawn from images already possessed by the federal government, including daguerreotypes that had to be rephotographed for display. Most came from the collection of English philanthropist William Blackmore. A fraction came from Hayden’s survey photographers, including William Henry Jackson (1843-1942), who assembled the album.

The two albums not only preserve rare images for historians, they revive the names of Hayden and Jackson. The latter’s Western landscapes later inspired photographer Ansel Adams. They also directly influenced Congress to found Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the first such area in the world and the first U.S. acknowledgement that the wild was worth preserving.

The albums’ images are captioned with short essays on tribes, Indian personalities, and ethnographic detail. The albums document many Indian ways and personalities.

Jackson’s portraits of Indians near Omaha, Neb., just after the Civil War — taken to satisfy American appetites for images of the real West — got him hired onto the federal survey team. He called the Omaha photos missionary work, which required days of travel on a buggy stacked with water, chemicals, and a portable darkroom. He paid his Indian subjects with cash, tobacco, knives, and old clothing.

In his 1940 autobiography, “Time Exposure,” Jackson remarked that the America of that period was “a hurly-burly era of thievery and abuse,” but that the surveys had a sober purity of purpose because of the straight-edge Hayden, whose only passion was to “inform America about Americans.”

“Group of Poncas.” Sequence 195, Vol. 1. Undated.

Transcribe the fateful arc

Examined page by page, the albums transcribe the fateful arc of American Indians as the United States pushed westward. The earliest photographs show stoic warriors in leather and beads. Then come warriors in group pictures, among translators and officials during treaty visits to Washington, D.C., followed by studio portraits of dark-skinned men cinched into Western clothing. Those are followed by pictures that prefigure America’s attempts at monocultural modernity: Indian children on schoolhouse steps.

For most of the last 140 years, the two outsized volumes — as big as serving platters and as heavy as iron — were cataloged as books. Hidden between covers and not outlined in the card catalog, the rare images apparently languished on Harvard shelves, first at the Peabody and then at the Tozzer Library, where they now reside, highly appreciated.

The albums were pulled from obscurity about a decade ago, when the University began a comprehensive survey of its photographic library holdings. (About 10 million images have since been uncovered, identified, recataloged, and in sometimes digitized.)

When Burton recataloged the two albums, said Janet Steins, the associate librarian for collections at Tozzer, he added what is now a commonplace hint for researchers online: “[graphic],” which indicates that a library holding includes images. (It was Steins who discovered the albums and who arranged for them to be repaired and digitized.)

A Pawnee woman identified only as “Squaw of Tu-Tuc-A-Picish-Te-Ruk.” Detail from Sequence 203, Vol. 1. Undated.

Surviving the shelves

The albums weathered their Harvard years well, but they required some work at the Weissman before being digitized. Two years ago, book conservatorKatherine Beaty replaced the leather covering on the spines, using special tools to impress the titles. Then photograph conservator Elena Bulat, with help from intern Tatiana Cole, cleaned each heavy-paper page and albumin image with soft brushes and cosmetic sponges.

Online, paging through the albums is like desktop time travel. The images are crisp and documentary, but they also sometimes shimmer with irony. One Indian chief, with bow drawn, poses behind a papier mache rock. Another, seated in a studio chair and looking skeptical, shakes the hand of a white man.

The text opens a window onto Indian tribes and bands that have fallen into obscurity. Meet the Rabbit Lake Chippewas, the Otoes, the Poncas, the Wacos, and the Bannocks.

The Indians’ names harken back to a distant past that was both more literal and more magical than today. There are pictures of Big Foot, Pretty Rock, Ear of Corn, Skin of the Heart, He Kills First, Jumping Thunder, He Goat, Graceful Walker, and On a Fine Horse.

One of the names expresses what the albums’ dogged archivists can only wish: Seen By All.

Science Camp for High School Students

29^th Annual California Range & Natural Resources Science Camp for High School Students - 2013 Applications now Available 

Mark your calendars for this great opportunity!

April 19^th is the deadline for submitting applications for Range Camp! Range Camp is a week-long camp experience for students ages 15-18 who have an interest in the science and conservation of natural resources in California. The camp is put on by the California-Pacific section of the Society for Range Management. Students learn plant identification, principles of livestock and wildlife management, forestry, fire ecology, hydrology and water quality, geology and soils, and management of stream and river environments. Field activities include learning to read wildlife ‘sign’, outdoor navigation with compasses, maps and GPS, forest management, a tour of a working ranch, and a beach BBQ. Sessions are taught by faculty from the University of California, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Humboldt State, and staff from local, state and federal agencies, and private professional scientists and natural resource management specialists. Range Camp runs from June 16^th-21^st at the University of California’s Elkus 4-H/Youth Ranch just south of Half Moon Bay. Information and applications are available at http://www.rangelands.org/casrm/HTML/rangecamps.html. Cost is $400.00. Applications will be considered after the deadline if spaces remain.

This is a unique opportunity for students thinking about college to learn about university-level courses of study in agriculture and natural resources, and for students looking for job opportunities to talk with a variety of professionals whose careers touch on their areas of interest.

The Society for Range Management will send the top two campers as representatives to a national high school youth forum held concurrently with its annual science conference in Orlando, Florida in February of 2013.

Many Resource Conservation Districts (RCDs) are willing to help sponsor students from their areas. If you need help finding a contact for your local RCD, start at the CARCD directory page: http://www.carcd.org/rcd_directory0.aspx. For more information about camp, and help finding other potential sponsors, please contact:

Northern California: Mary Kimball, (530) 795-1520 mary@landbasedlearning.org

Central California: Theresa Becchetti, (209) 525-6800 tabecchetti@ucdavis.edu

Southern California: Cece Dahlstrom, (619) 532-2269 carol.dahlstrom@navy.mil

Healing Power of Digital Storytelling

Psychology Student Explores the Healing Power of Digital Storytelling

Marc Dadigan

March 09, 2013

In the video entitled “Red Moon,” a Cheyenne man speaks of a self-hatred that permeated his soul even as a child. It went so deep, he wondered if his mother was paying his playmates to be his friends.

His voice sounds serene and calm, yet there is a faint tremble to it, belying the emotion beneath the surface. His words are accompanied by a mosaic of family photos and abstract stock footage: a bodiless beating heart and matadors dodging an angry bull among the images.

After a dark winter as a young man, after some family tragedies, he found himself confronted by a penetrating question: “Do you really want to live?” he says in the video. “I came back from that dark night with a yes, a resounding yes, I do.”

Read more athttps://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/03/09/psychology-student-explores-healing-power-digital-storytelling-147878

The Life Of Language

Defending Genocide ofAmerican Indians (news/racism)

This week on his 'WallBuilders Live' radio show, debunked Christian historian David Barton compared Native Americans of the 1700s to modern day terrorists and explained why the U.S. had to commit genocide of Native Americans (audio below).

Barton said that Native Americans declared war on "all the white guys" because missionaries had tried to convince Indians to stop torturing their enemies.

Barton claimed the Indians refused to stop torturing, so "we had to go in and we had to destroy Indian tribes all over until they" signed a treaty, reports RightWingWatch.org.

Barton also claimed that the U.S. government had to kill buffalo in the west in order to destroy the Native Americans' supply line and bring the "Indians to their knees."

"It's got to be based on what the enemy responds [to,] you cannot reason with certain types of terrorists; and see that's why we could not get the Indians to the table to negotiate with us on treaties until after we had thoroughly whipped so many tribes," said Barton.

"What happened was the Indian leaders said 'they're trying to change our culture' and so they declared war on all the white guys and went after the white guys and that was King Philip's War.  It was really trying to be civilized on one side and end torture and the Indians were threatened by the ending of torture and so we had to go in and we had to destroy Indian tribes all over until they said "oh, got the point, you're doing to us what we're doing to them, okay, we'll sign a treaty."

Source: RightWingWatch.org and WallbuildersLive.com

Aloha, Southeast Alaska (language)

By XH'UNEI - LANCE A. TWITCHELL

FOR THE JUNEAU EMPIRE

Earlier this month I was a member of a group that was greeted by about a hundred children who were not only fluent in the Hawaiian language, but were speakers from birth. Participants of the field study portion of the 3rd International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC) toured a Hawaiian immersion school in Hilo. Our day began with a welcoming ceremony performed by the students and responded to by Dorothy Lazore, a leader of the Mowhawk language revitalization movement. These children did not bear the burden of language murder or suicide, but just heard and spoke their ancestral language without hesitation or difficulty.

We have not had a birth speaker of a Southeast Alaska Native language in over fifty years, and that creates incredible gaps within our language population. So many of our Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people are currently living day after day without our languages that the death of those languages threatens to happen rather quietly, without any furious uprising or true movement to change attempts at cultural genocide. But we are going to defy that. We are going to imitate others who have been successful. In order to do that, we have to change. We have to understand that the daily routine, the comfort of living without language, is a quiet walk into a setting sun that will never rise again.

The key to language revitalization is this right here: speak it. You may feel like a terrible speaker. You might feel lost and up against brick walls, but you are going to enter into a consciousness that is radically different than an English-only Euroamerican worldview, and that does not come easy. We are going to have to hold each other up and not make fun of each other’s mistakes. We are going to have to create communities of speakers where there are very few or none. And that means giving up a lot of what the modern world would like us to think is necessary.

These children in Hawaii were learning science and math in Hawaiian. They did not have their first classes about the English language until the fourth grade. Now. Stop yourself and ask what you are thinking? Are you thinking that these children have less of an opportunity than others? Or that they will not be able to have the same skills as others? The interesting thing about those thoughts is that the reverse is true. Language is a key part of creating and understanding cultural identity. That is not the same as racial identity and differences. It is instead a worldview that was constructed over thousands of generations in many different places and situations, and exists at the subconscious and cellular levels.

If you take away the connection of people and language, then the people will inevitably die. It is taking a fish out of water. We have to understand how powerful this connection is, and make it a front burner issue instead of one that linguists and those with multicultural interests and empathies understand and talk about in conferences and publications that the majority of the public will ignore.

Language revitalization is now part of our general vocabulary. Genocide is not a bad word, but it is a reality of our collective history. We are the ones obligated to combat the efforts of killing off whole groups of people. Part of this revitalization is going to be ceremonies, healing, rediscovery of self. Another major part of it is putting the language back on the land, and that is where you come in, every single one of you.

When I was in Hawaii I saw the placenames everywhere in Hawaiian. The language was heard as soon as you stepped off the plane and was spoken, at least in part, by a large percentage of people, regardless of their cultural heritage. That is where we are headed with all of this. You might think Tlingit, Haida, or Tsimshian languages are hard, but learning them is nothing compared to having them stripped away with violent child abuse and cunning lies about intellectual or cultural superiority.

Yes, we are all in this together. It is going to become a much bigger thing than it is right now, and everyone is welcome at the feasts and tables. It begins with seeing that language survival is all about speaking and listening, and not being a passive receptacle for television, radio, and internet. That does not mean those things are bad; instead, we have to take our language to those media sources and create programs in our languages, write on social media sites and other places in our languages.

Our current students are texting in Tlingit, posting in Tlingit, playing games in Tlingit. The key to understanding what makes a speaker is just looking at what you do every day. Ask yourself this: did I speak the language today? Did I hear it? And did I do those things more than I did the day before? The right answers will let you know that you are a speaker of the language, and that you have taken ownership of it.

One of the most powerful things I heard in Hawaii was that they stopped waiting for things to happen. They did not care about regulations and laws, but they challenged them. They made certain that there was nothing else for them to do but succeed. And that means taking bigger steps each time, which is where we are at. We have a growing number of students and teachers. We have children who are ready to learn Tlingit without worrying about how hard it is or who speaks it and who does not. We are ready to worry less about mistakes and changes than we are about life and death.

The ceremony the Hawaiian children performed to welcome us was full of life, harmony, oratory, and healing. It was like coming to the end of a long and treacherous walk, where you have a vision of the brightest of possible days: and finally realize it. For much of my life I have thought about our generations, all of us who are in this place we call Southeast Alaska. It is place where languages are threatened, but will not die. It is a place where a generation was born to speak without the burdens of death, murder, suicide, and doubt holding them back. Genocide will become a thing of the past when we face it together, fading away like some horrible nightmare that we can finally wake from.

What I saw in Hawaii is a snapshot of what the future holds for us in Alaska, but that will only come as soon as we decide to stop waiting and start speaking. It is time for our current leadership to challenge the State of Alaska to recognize that it has 22 official languages of the state, and that only one of those is English. If one of these languages die, then it kills a piece of all of us, whether we want to admit it or not. And when one of them revitalizes, we come a step closer to a concept we call being human, having a consciousness that can look past the oversimplified arguments of “us” and “them”. We can have a multilingual society where children are not killing themselves, where respect is much higher on the intellectual food chain, and where our children are more free from the burdens of a violent and challenging past.

In many ways, we have made life more difficult for our own selves. Out of our current leadership at tribal, city, state, and federal governments, few (if any) elevate indigenous languages as a topic of importance. We sometimes talk about suicide rates, poverty, retention across education, and substance abuse. But we are not talking nearly enough about language, and more importantly we are not living within our languages enough. Those days are about to be put behind us, and that is because of the decisions every one of us are about to make. We will become reborn in the vision of our ancestors, and it will happen now before it is too late.

• Xh’unei - Lance A. Twitchell is Assistant Professor of Alaska Native Languages at UAS.