American Indians

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,...

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.

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. At a lavish event in the Chumash casino's concert hall Friday night, most of the tribe's 150 enrolled members lined up for copies of the long-awaited 608-page book.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first time Jose Freeman heard his tribe's lost language through the crackle of a 70-year-old recording, he cried. "My ancestors were speaking to me," said Freeman of the sounds captured when American Indians still inhabited California's Salinas Valley. "It was like coming home." Although the last native speaker of Salinan died almost half a century ago, more and more indigenous people are finding their extinct or endangered tongues, one word or song at a time, thanks to a late linguist and some UC Davis scholars who are working to transcribe his life's obsession.

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?

W. Richard West Jr., the recently retired founding director of the National Museum of the American Indian, spent $48,500 in museum funds to commission a portrait of himself and selected a non-Indian artist to create it, the Washington Post reported on Friday. The portrait of West by New York painter Burton Silverman hangs in a fourth-floor lounge of the museum, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution and is dedicated to the arts and culture of American Indians. West has come under fire recently for travel expenditures.