Tribal Government

The Oglala Sioux Tribal Council has impeached the tribe's president for proposing an abortion clinic on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in response to South Dakota's blanket prohibition on abortion. The 9-5 vote by the council removed Cecelia Fire Thunder, who was elected in November 2004 as the tribe's first female president. She said she would challenge the action.

When he needs groceries, J.C. Garcia bypasses his local market and drives 10 miles to another store so he doesn't bump into the man who stabbed him in the chest. It's been nearly four years since Garcia was severely wounded by his then-brother-in-law, a Pojoaque Indian, who has said he acted in self-defense. During that time, authorities were unable to prosecute the case because of jurisdictional confusion relating to Indian sovereignty.

After keeping the world at bay for five centuries, the Kuna Indians on Panama's unspoiled Caribbean coast now confront an insidious intruder: cocaine traffickers. The fiercely independent tribe inhabits Kuna Yala, a semiautonomous area that includes a coastal strip and the San Blas islands. The region is known mainly to foreign eco-tourists who can afford to get to its isolated white sand beaches.

A woman who was gang-raped on orders of a tribal council urged that the nation's highest court reinstate the death penalty against five of her attackers as the panel opened a hearing on the case Monday. Mukhtaran Mai, 33, was assaulted in 2002 after her 12-year-old brother was accused of having an affair with a woman from a powerful clan.

Vincent Armenta kept a promise to take his son to the Chumash Casino on his 18th birthday. A losing streak at a card table quickly emptied Armenta's wallet. As his losses approached $2,000, Armenta resorted to a strategy not found in "Beat the Dealer" or other blackjack bibles. "Let's put some green ones out there," he recalled telling the dealer. The dealer placed free $25 chips in front of each player at the table.

While saying that California Indian tribes reap $4 billion annually from their casinos, the chairman of the gambling tribes' trade group on Wednesday called Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's request that they pay their fair share to the state "amusing and troubling." Anthony Miranda, chairman of the California Indian Nations Gaming Assn., stopped short of rejecting Schwarzenegger's opening bargaining position that tribes pay at least $500 million annually to the state.

A thousand people gathered inside an air-conditioned tent on the Morongo Indian reservation in Cabazon on Wednesday for the groundbreaking of a project tribal leaders are calling a symbol of Native American determination: a 23-story, $250-million casino resort hotel that will soon be rising skyward in a high desert pass near Palm Springs.

A prominent Indian leader on Wednesday dismissed as a "ludicrous proposition" Gov. Gray Davis' desire to collect an additional $1.5 billion a year in gambling revenue from California tribes, and said most tribes would be content to live with their existing 20-year agreements with the state.

Ali Askeri was a mercurial mountain fighter with a bandoleer and a Kalashnikov. He battled the Iraqi regime in the '70s, but in the end it was his fellow Kurds who executed him with a rocket-propelled grenade. One of the killers -- in a comment destined for folklore -- quipped: "A big gun for a big man." The Kurdish past echoes with tribal wars, murder and vengeance. Over the last six years, living in a northern enclave protected from President Saddam Hussein's forces by U.S.

The Supreme Court took up a pair of California cases Monday, one to decide whether sex abuse charges can be brought for incidents that happened decades earlier and another to resolve whether state police can carry out raids on tribal reservations. Marion Stogner was 70 years old in 1998 when he was charged with committing lewd acts with his children from 1955 to 1973. The alleged incidents took place in Contra Costa County.