American Indians

Re "Last of the Tibetans," Opinion, March 26 Ian Buruma has many good points about the dangers Tibetan culture faces from Chinese modernization, but his opening sentences that describe American Indians as "doomed" and "reduced to peddling cheap mementos" call into question his ability to make such an assessment. Indeed, American Indians are going through a cultural renaissance wherein more of our youth are learning their languages, practicing their traditions and attaining more educational success than ever before.

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.

A member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe who killed a bald eagle for use in his tribe's Sun Dance must stand trial. A panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver reversed a 2006 decision by U.S. District Judge William Downes of Wyoming that had dismissed a criminal charge against Winslow Friday of Ethete. But the appeals court ruled that American Indians' religious freedoms are not violated by federal law protecting eagles or the requirement that they get permits to kill eagles.

This summer is overflowing with images of familiar superheroes and ominous villains, and the world of American Indian art is digging up its own version of the comic art form at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, N.M. "Comic strips were the first accessible form of mass media made available on reservations, and there was this immediate connection between native people and that type of work," said Antonio Chavarria, curator of ethnology,...

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.

Responding to recent violence on the Soboba Indian reservation, Sheriff Stanley Sniff appointed a retired police officer Monday to act as liaison between law enforcement and the county's tribal governments. Alexandro Tortes, 58, a member of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla tribe and a 33-year veteran of the Riverside Police Department, will serve until a full-time deputy is selected. Three Soboba tribal members were killed in gunfights with deputies in May, and three others have been involved in shootings with authorities since December.

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.

The Indian Health Service lost at least $15.8 million worth of equipment between 2004 and 2007 and later falsified documents to cover up some of those losses, the Government Accountability Office reported. The 5,000 pieces of lost or stolen equipment included a computer that contained more than 800 Social Security numbers and sensitive health information. Also missing are trucks, tractors, all-terrain vehicles and about a third of information technology items -- including computers, video projectors and digital cameras -- from the agency's headquarters in Rockville, Md. The GAO blamed mismanagement at the top of the embattled agency, which often runs out of money to provide adequate healthcare to the American Indians it serves.

A federal judge ruled that American Indian plaintiffs are entitled to $455 million in a long-running trust case, a fraction of the $47 billion they sought. U.S. District Judge James Robertson's number is close to government estimates. The lawsuit -- filed on behalf of half a million American Indians and heirs -- claims they were swindled out oil, gas, grazing, timber and other royalties overseen by the Interior Department since 1887.

HOWES CAVE, N.Y. -- Long before Jackie Robinson endured torrents of racial taunts in breaking baseball's color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Louis Sockalexis had a bull's-eye on his back. From the day in 1897 when he first donned a uniform for the Cleveland Spiders, Sockalexis suffered more than his share of racial slurs. "If the small and big boys of Brooklyn find it a pleasure to shout at me, I have no objections," Sockalexis told the Brooklyn Eagle during his rookie season.