Native American

IT'S BEEN a boho summer, with more frayed denim shorts and fringe on young Hollywood than there was at Woodstock. But now, as we move into fall, the look is going more native, Native American that is, with the kind of Southwestern hues and beaded, feathered details that we haven't seen since the '80s heyday of Ralph Lauren's Santa Fe chic. The trend is being interpreted by high-end designers and fast-fashion chain stores. Better yet, you can hit local boutiques and museum shops that carry the real deal -- authentic and inexpensive items actually made by Native American tribes.

Re "Oregon forbids Native American mascots," May 20 Native Americans have faced numerous battles. They have been victims of genocide - and people continue to view them as mascots? Team mascots are typically animals, occupations and objects. With so many Native American mascots, are Native Americans part of that group as well? Nobody seems to care about the things these people have already faced. I am glad some are finally reversing course. Every board of education throughout the country should follow Oregon's lead and ban such offensive mascots.

When Karen Adams of West Covina saw the snapshot of the two black-haired babies with pink bows, she said she felt a flower blossom in her heart. They were her granddaughters, but she had never seen them because they had been given away to adoptive parents half a continent away. No matter how well the couple cares for them, Adams, a descendant of Native Americans from a Northern California Pomo tribe, said the twins, now 2, don't belong with outsiders.

Nobody thought much about the locked metal cabinet in the medical school at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. It was another forgotten fixture in the anatomy department - until a researcher last year found seven skulls with yellowing labels indicating the remains were those of Native Americans from California's Central Coast. Earlier this month, the skulls and several bone fragments were boxed and gingerly placed aboard a jet to LAX at London's Heathrow Airport.

Paula Starr is a Native American. She doesn't live in a tepee. She doesn't travel by horseback, go barefoot in the shopping mall or cook her family's meals over an open flame. If she says "ugg," it's probably because she's lifting something heavy.

Re "Oregon forbids Native American mascots," May 20 Native Americans have faced numerous battles. They have been victims of genocide - and people continue to view them as mascots? Team mascots are typically animals, occupations and objects. With so many Native American mascots, are Native Americans part of that group as well? Nobody seems to care about the things these people have already faced. I am glad some are finally reversing course. Every board of education throughout the country should follow Oregon's lead and ban such offensive mascots.

The Mohawk, the Onondaga, the Seneca, the Oneida, and the Cayuga made up the Iroquois League of Nations in eastern New York state. The Iroquois Nation's democratic government had been operating successfully for hundreds of years and greatly influenced the drafting of the U.S. Constitution. The executive, judicial and legislative branches were based in part on this Native American government.

For 90 tense minutes last month, Sheriff Mike Lacy in Utah tried to prevent yet another person connected to the theft of Native American artifacts from committing suicide. Two defendants had already taken their own lives after federal authorities charged 24 people in June with looting Native American sites in the West. Now a despondent relative of a third defendant had called Lacy. The sheriff of San Juan County kept the caller on the phone until deputies could arrive and make sure everything was OK. But there was still another suicide to come.

In the 1960s, when some in academia still denied the existence of Native American literature, Paula Gunn Allen embarked on a career that proved them wrong -- and altered the required reading lists of literature classes on U.S. college campuses. The former UCLA professor helped define the canon of Native American literature, encouraged its development by anthologizing new American Indian writers and nurtured a broader audience for the work. "This is great literature -- American literature," Allen said in a 1990 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Skeletal remains found in an empty lot are those of a Native American who may have lived some 400 years ago, authorities said Thursday. The bones were discovered by a construction crew laying the foundation for a new home in the 23000 block of Bluebird Drive. Among the remains dug up by a forensic archeologist were parts of fingers, a rib and a jawbone. County coroners contacted the Native American Heritage Commission informing them the bones were those of a Native American.

Howard Terpning paints how the West was lived and lost more than 120 years ago. His subject is 19th century Native Americans, although he is not their descendant. Some of his canvases aim to capture the courage, dignity and desperation of the fight to keep their land. Many are carefully detailed depictions of the ways of life they fought to save. "Tribute to the Plains People," now at the Autry National Center of the American West in Griffith Park, is the biggest solo show of Terpning's career - a retrospective that covers 35 years and documents his standing as the acknowledged leader of a popular but not universally admired movement in which paintings become time machines into the Old West.

Developers in the Mojave Desert last month were so keen on going forward with their project that they didn't consult with Native Americans about the ancient objects that might lie underground or conduct the required archaeological work in a thorough way. This has happened before: It happened most recently in downtown Los Angeles last year at the site of one of the area's oldest burial grounds. Now it's happening again 200 miles east, in the desert. But there's a key difference between the two. In the case of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, the new cultural center honoring Mexican and Mexican American history in L.A., there was little legitimate reason to rush the job once remains from a 19th century cemetery were discovered.

David Treuer never planned on writing nonfiction. "I was happy working on my novels," the fiction writer and USC professor says over the phone from Ann Arbor, where he is visiting the University of Michigan to talk about his new book, "Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life" (Grove: 330 pp., $26). "But after the Red Lake shooting in 2005" - in which a 16-year-old named Jeffrey James Weise went on a shooting spree at a school on Minnesota's Red Lake Reservation - "I became upset and frustrated with the coverage.

The Seattle Police Department has broken its trust with the community by using excessive force, charged federal investigators who called for more training and better supervision. The conclusions were reached after more than eight months of investigation into the department's use of force, Assistant Atty. Gen. Thomas E. Perez of the U.S. Justice Department's civil rights division told reporters Friday at a Seattle news conference. "We found that the systems of accountability are broken.

Pulphead Essays John Jeremiah Sullivan Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 384 pp., $16 paper Reading a great essay is like seeing a writer's brain working, ideas in motion caught by a flash of lightning. It's like sitting down with a smart college friend for a conversation that jumps and leaps and connects, in which you have to only nod and say "wow" from time to time. This is a trick, of course - essays are anything but extemporaneous - but John Jeremiah Sullivan's first collection, "Pulphead," has it all. It is thoughtful, electric and alive.

Bum, bum, bum, bum … As the Choctaw drummer settles into his cadence, nearly 100 men in blood-red shirts, shorts and bandannas huddle around their leader in a darkening high school parking lot beneath the golden glow of a floodlight. "Big night!" James Denson, the team's star player, shouts three times. At 6-foot-3, he's taller than most, a muscular 208 pounds and square-jaw handsome. His team, Beaver Dam, is just minutes away from playing in the championship game of an ancient and violent sport known as stickball, a cousin of lacrosse that is defiantly true to its American Indian roots.

If, as has been said, Montana is a small town with really long streets, that's never more true than in the remote but stunning area known as the Hi-Line. Originally created by the tracks of the Great Northern Railway, this region close to the Canadian border features venerable hamlets such as Cut Bank, Shelby and Rudyard ("596 Nice People, One Sorehead") strung out along U.S. 2 like links in a long and stubborn chain. "When you drive Highway 2," says Chaske Spencer, shaking his head, "you really go back in time.

I got my first lesson in Indians portrayed as sports team mascots in the early 1950s when my father took me to a Cleveland Indians-New York Yankees game. Dad gave me money to buy a baseball cap, and I was conflicted. I loved the Yankees, primarily because fellow Oklahoman Mickey Mantle had just come up and was being touted as rookie of the year. But being mixed-blood Muscogee/Creek, I felt a (misplaced) loyalty to the Indians. So I bought the Cleveland cap with the famous Chief Wahoo logo on it. When we got back to Oklahoma, my mother took one look at the cap with its leering, big-nosed, buck-toothed redskin caricature just above the brim, jerked it off my head and threw it in the trash.