American Indians

Striking at a longtime practice in the Four Corners area, federal authorities Wednesday unsealed indictments against 24 people in what they called the largest investigation ever into the looting of Native American artifacts on public lands. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the charges at a Salt Lake City news conference and said in a telephone interview that many of the stolen items, valued at $335,000, came from sacred burial sites.

In television ads that began running statewide Thursday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger urges voters to endorse gambling expansion deals he struck with four Southern California Indian tribes. The deals were approved by the Legislature last summer and were to take effect this week. But competing gambling interests and other opponents gathered enough signatures to ask voters to repeal them by rejecting Propositions 94, 95, 96 and 97 on the Feb. 5 ballot.

The most confusing measures on Tuesday's state ballot are the four Indian gambling propositions. But, cutting through all the fabrication and jargon, there's one simple way to look at this. The central question is: Should the state grab, by whatever legal means, any money it can find to help balance its books? Or has the expansion of Vegas-style Indian gambling in California gone far enough?

On an uninviting swatch of arid desert, marked by sagebrush and mesquite trees just east of the California border, the winds of war blew together the fates of two beleaguered peoples. In a now familiar tale, 120,000 Japanese Americans were removed from the West Coast and relocated to internment camps after Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent U.S. entry into World War II. But in a little known piece of that history, the U.S.

State Senate leaders chastised UC Berkeley administrators Tuesday for trampling on the civil rights of Native Americans by not returning the remains of thousands of their ancestors held in storage at a campus museum. Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), the incoming Senate leader, accused the university of discriminating against Native Americans by keeping the bones and artifacts at the Phoebe A.

More than a quarter-century after his death and 56 years after he single-handedly took out three enemy machine-gun nests in the Korean War, Army Master Sgt. Woodrow Wilson Keeble was awarded the Medal of Honor on Monday -- the first Sioux to receive the nation's top decoration for bravery in battle.

A generation ago, the ancient Chumash tongue of Samala was all but dead, its songs and sagas buried in a university basement beneath mountains of yellowing research notes. But now Samala is the talk of the reservation. Thanks largely to a non-American Indian graduate student who was working for pocket money 40 years ago, the tribe has unveiled the first major Samala dictionary, a key moment in the language's rebirth.

Exploiting a loophole in a deal struck with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a San Diego County Indian tribe has avoided paying the cash-strapped state $30 million in gambling profits. Voters in February allowed four tribes to expand their casino operations in exchange for a larger share of their revenues.

Today marks the anniversary of an iconic moment of American history: Custer's Last Stand, the culmination of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer's disastrous attack on a coalition of Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians camped on the Little Bighorn River. Nearly every American knows the image: On a dusty, bloody hill, Custer and the final survivors of his battalion fight to the last against merciless hordes of Indians who press closer at every moment.

No one really had any idea how many Native American writers there were in Hollywood. But when the Writers Guild of America West sent out the call for qualified writers to form their own diversity committee, only three turned out for the first meeting. Fewer than a dozen working professionals eventually signed up. "It was shocking to find out how few of us there actually were," said Micah Wright, the chair of the new WGAW American Indian Writers Caucus.