Native Americans

Several Native American guest hosts are scheduled to take visitors on tours of Rancho Sierra Vista/Satwiwa, a Chumash spiritual site managed by the National Park Service, in coming weeks. On Sunday, Mike Burgess, a Comanche gourd dancer, will lead a hike at Satwiwa from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Burgess is on the Los Angeles County American Indian Commission and is a former journalist for various Native American publications.

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.

Tim McGraw's "Indian Outlaw" is the fastest-rising country single on the pop charts since Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" in 1992, but not everyone is celebrating. Two country radio stations in Minneapolis are refusing to play the song after complaints that some of the lyrics are offensive to Native Americans.

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.

President Obama is preparing to appoint a policy advisor to his senior White House staff to work with Native American tribes on issues central to their well-being and prosperity, First Lady Michelle Obama said Monday on a visit to the Interior Department. The advisor would work with tribes and across the government on issues such as sovereignty, healthcare and education, Obama said. Native Americans have "a wonderful partner in the White House right now," the first lady said.

"We must make our own films and programs," Chickasaw artist Gary Whitedeer says of Native American people's efforts to spread the word about their history. And so they have, with TBS' "The Native Americans," which, at six hours over three evenings, is the biggest Native American-made television series ever. So, is "The Native Americans" the work of Whitedeer's dreams?

Duane Noriyuki's story of two women and their role in the Indian uprising at Wounded Knee, S.D., in 1973 ("Unsung Spirits," Oct. 14) was nuanced and poignant. The uprising 25 years ago was inspired by the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, a tragedy that continues to resonate among the Lakota people and the relatives of the victims. We live today in an age of apology, a time when the president and others issue official mea culpas for such policies as those behind the slavery of African Americans and the internment of Japanese Americans.

Parents of public school children of American Indian, Native Hawaiian or Alaskan Native descent may enroll them free in the Ventura County Indian Education Consortium. Tribal cards and documentation are not required. The 21-year-old consortium, based out of the Ventura Unified School District, serves about 1,000 kindergartners through 12th-graders in 113 schools countywide.

A campaign mailing by former Republican Rep. John Thune of South Dakota, who is trying to oust Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, drew criticism from some Native Americans for perceived racist overtones. A flier stuffed into voter mailboxes in western South Dakota included a picture of prairie dogs with the line, "The dogs are lining up to vote for Tom Daschle." The image is a reference to the prairie dogs that plague South Dakota ranchers, a problem that has become a campaign concern.

An exhibition juxtaposing paintings, drawings and photographs by non-native artists with American Indian artifacts depicted in the visual images opens Thursday at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum. "Native Americans, Five Centuries of Changing Views" covers eight major Indian groups in North America, and includes works by artists such as George Catlin, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer, Charles Russell, Frederic Remington and Eastman Johnson.

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.

They amble in with overgrown manes and beards, looking as if they've spent the night on the street. Some of them have. Eyes downcast, they climb three metal stairs, duck through the doorway and sink into the black vinyl chair, where the proprietor begins to snip. By the time he has brushed their necks with talc and patted their cheeks with clove-scented after-shave, they could pass for anyone's impeccably coiffed father or brother or uncle. In reality, they are veterans whose haggard faces reflect the psychic scars of service in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan and of their ongoing battles with addiction, grief and pain.

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.