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.

When Pechanga Indian leaders hired anthropologist John Johnson in 2004, they had one request: find out if the Madariaga clan were truly members of the tribe. Generations of them had grown up on the reservation. Family patriarch Lawrence Madariaga, 90, had built his home there, erected the local clinic, served on tribal committees and lived on Hunter Lane, named after his great-grandmother, Paulina Hunter. He even received a lifetime achievement award from the tribe.

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.

Indian casinos in California are regulated by a web of tribal, state and federal agencies. The primary responsibility for ensuring the integrity of gambling rests with individual tribal governments. As sovereign entities, they are not required to make public information about how they regulate their casinos. Native American leaders estimate that tribes spend more than $260 million a year and employ more than 2,700 people to enforce regulations at about 350 casinos nationwide.

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.

If the Walt Disney Co. incurred the wrath of Arab Americans angered at their portrayal in "Aladdin," the studio seems to have played it safe when it comes to the depiction of Native Americans in its upcoming animated movie, "Pocahontas." While the film has yet to be viewed in its entirety, those who have seen snippets suggest that the portrait gives new meaning to the phrase "politically correct."

From the evidence of words they spoke, the trash they scattered and the genes they left their descendants, the mysterious first settlers of the Americas landed in the New World as long as 40,000 years ago, well before the last ice age swept across the continent, new research suggests.

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.

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.

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.