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.

In a closely divided vote, the board that oversees retirement benefits for Los Angeles police officers and firefighters on Thursday chose a former official with the U.S. Department of Interior as its new top executive. The board voted 5-4 to hire Ray Joseph to lead the Fire and Police Pensions retirement system. Joseph spent a year serving as executive director for the Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians, overseeing Indian trust assets, according to his resume. All five board members who voted for Joseph were appointed by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, while the four who dissented represent current and retired public safety employees, city officials said.

I was a little Spokane Indian boy who read every book and saw every movie about Indians, no matter how terrible. I'd read those historical romance novels about the steroidal Indian warrior ravaging the virginal white schoolteacher. I can still see the cover art.

Russell Means, who gained international notoriety as one of the leaders of the 71-day armed occupation of Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1973 and continued to be an outspoken champion of American Indian rights after launching a career as an actor in films and television in the 1990s, has died. He was 72. Means died Monday at his home in Porcupine, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Reservation, said Glenn Morris, his legal representative. Diagnosed with esophageal cancer in July 2011 and told that it had spread too far for surgery, Means refused to undergo heavy doses of radiation and chemotherapy.

Over the years, a couple of dozen descendants of the Chumash Indians have complied with the odd requests of their old friend John Johnson, a leading scholar of the tribe's culture and head of the anthropology department at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. After all, what harm could come from parting with a few of their hairs or letting him swab the inside of their cheeks for a saliva sample?

When Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" premiered last December, the action-filled film set against the backdrop of the Maya empire launched the career of a young Texan named Rudy Youngblood. In interviews plugging the movie, Youngblood, who plays the film's central character, Jaguar Paw, routinely discussed his Indian ancestry and his connections to three American tribes.

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.

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 will be the site next week of the start of a yearlong "world celebration" honoring Native American and Indian people of the Western Hemisphere in anticipation of the 500th anniversary of their first encounter with Christopher Columbus. The first event of "The Americas Before Columbus--A World Celebration for Native Americans," will be held Monday morning at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, after a press conference there.

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.

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.

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.

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.