American Indians

Marilyn Vann can trace her Cherokee roots back more than 200 years through generations of Native Americans and the descendants of black slaves who lived among them. She has mountains of paper -- birth certificates, tribal enrollment cards, land deeds, affidavits, yellowing photographs -- documenting her family's life within the tribe.

During the election cycle we tend to ask: What does America mean; where are we going? And then someone decides to check on the Indians to find out the answer, as though Indians represent America's soul hidden in the attic. And of course politicians have long stood next to their "souls" and posed for pictures on the campaign trail. Within the last year, Diane Sawyer and "20/20" did a special on the sorry conditions at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and the New Yorker featured a grim photo essay on Pine Ridge too. The New York Times published a piece on brutal crime at the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming and another on the deep financial problems at Foxwoods, the Pequot-owned "world's largest" casino in Connecticut.

When Karen Adams of West Covina saw the snapshot of the two black-haired babies with pink bows, she said she felt a flower blossom in her heart. They were her granddaughters, but she had never seen them because they had been given away to adoptive parents half a continent away. No matter how well the couple cares for them, Adams, a descendant of Native Americans from a Northern California Pomo tribe, said the twins, now 2, don't belong with outsiders.

An improved economy and lower unemployment rates boosted revenue at American Indian gaming casinos in 2010, helping them rebound from their first ever drop in revenue a year earlier, a report said. The 1% increase in gambling revenue generated by 448 American Indian facilities in 2010 marks a rebound from the 1% decline in revenue in 2009, according to a study released Tuesday by Alan Meister, an economist with Arlington, Va.-based Nathan Associates Inc. Non-gambling revenue, such as spending on food and entertainment at casinos, increased 0.3% in 2010.

Tim McGraw's "Indian Outlaw" is the fastest-rising country single on the pop charts since Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" in 1992, but not everyone is celebrating. Two country radio stations in Minneapolis are refusing to play the song after complaints that some of the lyrics are offensive to Native Americans.

City officials moved a step closer to opening a third museum in Glendale, one that would house American Indian artifacts and items belonging to two prominent families. "The proposal has been very well accepted by both the Parks and Recreation Commission and the Historic Preservation Commission," said Nello Iacono, director of the city's Parks Department.

Like creatures of the ark, Saddlerock Ranch's animals are here in pairs: llamas, emus, macaws, peacocks, camels and zebras. But these California immigrants are commonplace compared to the pictographs tucked amid the ranch's towering rock formations and grapevine-studded hills. Archeologists say the drawings were made by Chumash Indians, the original settlers of the area, to depict a pivotal event in California history: Their encounter with Spanish explorers more than 200 years ago.

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to allow a logging road to be built through Indian burial sites is yet another slap in the face to a people for whom the term "American Indian" can seem nothing more than an oxymoron (Part I, April 20). The court has blatantly shown its duplicitous nature by protecting the rights of some groups (notably, the Amish's free exercise of religion in rejecting compulsory schooling for their children) while continuing to ignore those of a people who live under a state of virtual subjection.

Actor James Cromwell ("Babe") and Paramount Pictures will host a benefit screening of "The Education of Little Tree"--a film about an 8-year-old boy who goes to live with his Cherokee relatives after the death of his parents--on Dec. 20 at 7 p.m. at Paramount Studios, 5555 Melrose Ave. Cromwell stars in the movie along with "Dances With Wolves" alumni Tantoo Cardinal and Graham Greene. Tickets are $30 for adults and $5 for children under 12.

The story of how Americans have treated--and mistreated--their native brethren is a trail of tears and shame that continues to this very day. It unfolds in outrageous detail in the 238-page report of a Senate investigating committee that documents the mismanagement, corruption, fraud and neglect that infect federal programs designed to help American Indians. No member of Congress can read this report without being moved to action.

Hollywood money Re " Mayor meets Hollywood ," Business, Aug. 25 Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa did not need to meet with film executives to solicit ideas on how to make Los Angeles a more film-friendly city. The answer is quite simple: Villaraigosa should do everything in his power to assure that Los Angeles is the most inexpensive city in the nation to film in. Not only would this bring back thousands of outsourced entertainment jobs to Los Angeles, but it would also secure the support of Hollywood in a future bid for the governorship.

Luke McKissack, a prominent Los Angeles criminal defense and civil rights attorney whose clients included Sirhan B. Sirhan after his conviction for the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy and an Army private charged with the hand-grenade killing of two officers in Vietnam, has died. He was 72. McKissack, who also was a TV legal analyst during the O.J. Simpson criminal trial, died Sunday of complications from brain cancer at his home in Los Angeles, said his son-in-law, Brian Chisholm.

Decades after many of America's national forests have been tamed into tree farms and campgrounds, the Tongass National Forest stands as a reminder of what wilderness once was. Beneath its 800-year-old stands of Sitka spruce and Western hemlock lurks a mossy hush, a thick, verdant silence. But even the 17-million-acre crown jewel of the national forest system has not been immune to the demands of the dollar. Years of heavy logging laid bare large swaths of the forest, especially on Prince of Wales Island, where entire hillsides were shaved by clear cuts.

As legislators consider making California the first state in the country to legalize and regulate Internet poker, a coalition of Indian gaming tribes warned them Friday that the proposal would not create the budget windfall backers claim and could actually cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars. The tribes, which have hired Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's former budget chief to help make their case, argue that the legalization of Internet poker would violate existing gaming compacts and allow the tribes to stop paying the state its $365-million annual cut of slot machine revenue.

Everyone thought the tall, strange white man was some kind of genius. But to teenage Ernestine De Soto he was a giant pain in the neck, a nosy, "Ichabod Crane-like" character who drew her mother's attention from its rightful place -- on her. John Peabody Harrington studied De Soto's Chumash family for nearly 50 years, pumping her great-grandmother, her grandmother and her mother for the tiniest details of their lives. Everything fascinated him: the Chumash names of places mostly forgotten, of fish no longer caught -- even, to the family's puzzlement, of private parts never discussed in polite company.

Tribal thinking and tribal identity factor heavily in Richard Montoya's new play "Palestine, New Mexico," running through Jan. 24 at the Mark Taper Forum. There's the close-knit tribe otherwise known as the U.S. military. An American Indian tribe that must deal with the loss of one of its sons, Pfc. Ray Birdsong, killed in Afghanistan under mysterious circumstances. The tribal intrigues of the Taliban forces sowing mayhem throughout Central Asia. There's even an allusion to the lost tribes of Israel -- and to the diaspora that brought Jews from Europe to the American Southwest -- in Montoya's comedic drama, in which strands of Chicano, Jewish and Native American history are knotted together in one thick, complex braid.

The only part of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian regularly open to the public -- the museum store that had weekend hours only -- will close next month when its space is taken over by a conservation project. The decision by the Autry National Center of the American West, which runs the Southwest Museum in Mount Washington and the larger Museum of the American West in Griffith Park, to virtually suspend public operations for an estimated three years immediately inflamed the already heated suspicions of some Southwest Museum supporters.

The Obama administration on Tuesday announced it would pay Native Americans $3.4 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit that claimed the federal government cheated tribes for more than a century of royalties for oil, mineral and other leases. The settlement ends a 13-year legal battle that led to 3,600 filings, millions of pages of discovery documents and 11 separate appellate decisions. It is the largest settlement Native Americans have ever received from the federal government, eclipsing the sum of all previous settlements, according to the plaintiff's lawyers.