Rain Forest Tribe’s Charge of Neglect Is Shrouded by Religion and Politics

By SIMON ROMERO
Published: October 6, 2008
PUERTO AYACUCHO, Venezuela — Three years after President Hugo Chávez expelled American missionaries from the Venezuelan Amazon, accusing them of using proselytism of remote tribes as a cover for espionage, resentment is festering here over what some tribal leaders say was official negligence that led to the deaths of dozens of indigenous children and adults.

Some leaders of the Yanomami, one of South America’s largest forest-dwelling tribes, say that 50 people in their communities in the southern rain forest have died since the expulsion of the missionaries in 2005 because of recurring shortages of medicine and fuel, and unreliable transportation out of the jungle to medical facilities.

Mr. Chávez’s government disputes the claims and points to more spending than ever on social welfare programs for the Yanomami. The spending is part of a broader plan to assert greater military and social control over expanses of rain forest that are viewed as essential for Venezuela’s sovereignty.

The Yanomami leaders are wading into a politicized debate about how officials react to health care challenges faced by the Yanomami and other Amazonian tribes. In recent interviews here, government officials contended that the Yanomami could be exaggerating their claims to win more resources from the government and undercut its authority in the Amazon.

Meanwhile, the Yanomami claims come amid growing concern in Venezuela over indigenous health care after a scandal erupted in August over a tepid official response to a mystery disease that killed 38 Warao Indians in the country’s northeast.

“This government makes a big show of helping the Yanomami, but rhetoric is one thing and reality another,” said Ramón González, 49, a Yanomami leader from the village of Yajanamateli who traveled recently to Puerto Ayacucho, the capital of Amazonas State, to ask military officials and civilian doctors for improved health care.

“The truth is that Yanomami lives are still considered worthless,” said Mr. González, who was converted to Christianity by New Tribes Mission, a Florida group expelled in 2005. “The boats, the planes, the money, it’s all for the criollos, not for us,” he said, using a term for nonindigenous Venezuelans.

The Yanomami leaders offer a far different image of the tribe than those found in anthropology books, which often depict it in Rousseaulike settings with painted faces and clad in loincloths.

There are about 26,000 Yanomami in the Amazon rain forest, in Venezuela and Brazil, where they subsist as seminomadic hunters and cultivators of crops like manioc and bananas.

They remain susceptible to ailments for which they have weak defenses, including respiratory diseases and drug-resistant strains of malaria. In Puerto Ayacucho, they can be seen wandering through the traffic-clogged streets, clad in the modern uniform of T-shirts and baggy pants, toting cellphones.

Earlier this decade, the anthropology world was consumed by claims by the writer Patrick Tierney that American scholars may have started and exacerbated a measles epidemic in the late 1960s that killed hundreds of Yanomami.

And claims of medical neglect emerged before Mr. Chávez expelled the American missionaries, who numbered about 200. They administered care to the Yanomami with donated medicine from the United States and transported them to clinics on small propeller planes using dozens of airstrips carved out of the jungle.

New Tribes, the most prominent of the expelled groups, has denied Mr. Chávez’s charges of espionage but declined to comment for this article, citing the tense relations between Venezuela and the United States.

Mr. González and other Yanomami leaders provided the names of 50 people, including 22 children, who they said died from ailments like malaria and pneumonia after the military limited civilian and missionary flights to their villages in 2005. The military replaced the missionaries’ operations with its own fleet of small planes and helicopters, but critics say the missions were infrequent or unresponsive.

The Yanomami leaders said they made the list public after showing it to health and military officials and receiving a cold response. “They told us we should be grateful for the help we’re already being given,” said Eduardo Mejía, 24, a Yanomami leader from the village of El Cejal.

The official in charge of transportation in Amazonas’s interior, Gen. Yomar José Rubio of the 52nd Infantry Brigade in Puerto Ayacucho, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But other officials here questioned the claims.

“The missionaries were in Amazonas for 50 years, creating dependent indigenous populations in some places, so their withdrawal was bound to have positive and negative effects,” said Carlos Botto, a senior official with Caicet, a government research institute that focuses on tropical diseases.

“But one cannot forget that the Yanomami and other indigenous groups have learned how to exert pressure on the government in order to receive food or other benefits,” he said. “This does not mean there aren’t challenges in providing them with health care, but caution is necessary with claims like these.”

The dispute has also focused attention on an innovative government project created in late 2005, the Yanomami Health Plan. With a staff of 46, it trains some Yanomami to be health workers in their villages while sending doctors into the jungle to provide health care to remote communities.

“We have 14 doctors in our team, with 11 trained in Cuba for work in jungle areas,” said Meydell Simancas, 32, a tropical disease specialist who directs the project from a compound here once owned by New Tribes Mission.

Dr. Simancas said that more than 20 Yanomami had been trained as paramedics, and that statistics showed that doctors had increased immunizations and programs to control malaria and river blindness across Amazonas.

The Yanomami leaders complaining of negligence acknowledged Dr. Simancas’s good intentions. But they said serious problems persisted in coordinating access to doctors and medicine with the military, which the Yanomami and government doctors both rely on for travel in and out of the rain forest.

Dr. Simancas suggested the claims of the dozens of deaths originated in the village of Coshilowateli, where a holdout American evangelist group, Padamo Mission, has fought expulsion by arguing that its leaders cannot be expelled because they hold Venezuelan citizenship.

“There is subjective data that could be worth investigating,” Dr. Simancas said, referring to Coshilowateli, “but it comes from a community in a situation of political tension.”

Michael Dawson, a leader of Padamo Mission, denied the claims of negligence were exaggerated or politically motivated. He also said they originated not in Coshilowateli, but in villages where the Yanomami were converted to Christianity by missionaries Mr. Chávez had expelled.

“It is easier for them to just blame us rather than admit they have really not helped the Indians much,” said Mr. Dawson, 53, who was born and raised among the Yanomami. “Every name on the list is a verified case of an emergency where repeated requests for help went out over public airwaves via ham radio.”

For their part, Yanomami leaders point to what they consider to be a broad pattern of neglect and condescension from public officials. “They put pictures of Yanomami everywhere, on tourist brochures, in airport lobbies, even on ambulances here in Puerto Ayacucho,” said Andrés González, 38, a Yanomami leader.

“That’s where they want us, in pictures, not positions of power,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Yanomami who do make it here for medical care stay at a squalid compound once owned by foreign missionaries who were expelled in 2005. In the property’s trash-strewn yard, women cook manioc in steel pots over a fire, under the shade of a mango tree.

The men lounge in hammocks slung in an open-air shed. Pedro Camico, 36, said he traveled here from El Cejal after one of his children died of malaria; she was not on the Yanomami leaders’ list of 50 dead. He stood by his son, Misael, 4, also sick with malaria but with the hope of recovery through medicine here.

“I have one child dead and another alive, but I am here with my son,” Mr. Camico said. “I am one of the lucky ones.”

6 Villagers Killed in Clash at Mexico Ruins

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 4, 2008
Filed at 8:59 p.m. ET

SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico (AP) -- Police clashed with hundreds of villagers who seized the entrance to a Mayan archaeological site and six protesters were killed, state officials said Saturday.

Hundreds of villagers had occupied the entrance to the Chinkultic ruins for nearly a month, saying they were protesting excessive entrance fees and a lack of investment in the area.

The protesters fought police with sticks, rocks and machetes, according to the state Justice Department. Protesters managed to wrest guns away from some officers and poured gasoline on others, threatening to set them on fire, the department said.

Six protesters were killed in Friday's raid, and two dozen other people were injured, including 16 police, the department said.

Irma Trinidad, an indigenous leader who participated in the clash, said six of her comrades were shot to death by police. She said 10 other protesters had bullet wounds and 28 were arrested.

Chiapas state Justice Secretary Amador Rodriguez Lozano ordered 300 state police who participated in the raid to be detained for questioning. No charges have been filed.

Chinkultic is a Mayan archaeological site about 1,200 years old, located near the Montebello lakes near the Guatemalan border.

The villagers, most of them from the Mayan Tzeltal and Tzotzil cultures, drove administrative workers off the site on Sept. 7 with sticks, but allowed the archeologists to keep working.

The protesters charged visitors 20 pesos (US$1.80) for entrance rather than the official 35 pesos (US$3) and said they would use the money to fix roads and make other infrastructure improvements.

Tourists continued to visit the site during the takeover. At a booth outside the entrance, officials from the National Institute of Anthropology and History warned tourists about the protests but said the site was still open to visitors.

McCain and Team Have Many Ties to Gambling Industry

Senator John McCain was on a roll. In a room reserved for high-stakes gamblers at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, he tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table. When the marathon session ended around 2:30 a.m., the Arizona senator and his entourage emerged with thousands of dollars in winnings.

A lifelong gambler, Mr. McCain takes risks, both on and off the craps table. He was throwing dice that night not long after his failed 2000 presidential bid, in which he was skewered by the Republican Party’s evangelical base, opponents of gambling. Mr. McCain was betting at a casino he oversaw as a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and he was doing so with the lobbyist who represents that casino, according to three associates of Mr. McCain.

The visit had been arranged by the lobbyist, Scott Reed, who works for the Mashantucket Pequot, a tribe that has contributed heavily to Mr. McCain’s campaigns and built Foxwoods into the world’s second-largest casino. Joining them was Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s current campaign manager. Their night of good fortune epitomized not just Mr. McCain’s affection for gambling, but also the close relationship he has built with the gambling industry and its lobbyists during his 25-year career in Congress.

As a two-time chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, Mr. McCain has done more than any other member of Congress to shape the laws governing America’s casinos, helping to transform the once-sleepy Indian gambling business into a $26-billion-a-year behemoth with 423 casinos across the country. He has won praise as a champion of economic development and self-governance on reservations.

“One of the founding fathers of Indian gaming” is what Steven Light, a University of North Dakota professor and a leading Indian gambling expert, called Mr. McCain.

As factions of the ferociously competitive gambling industry have vied for an edge, they have found it advantageous to cultivate a relationship with Mr. McCain or hire someone who has one, according to an examination based on more than 70 interviews and thousands of pages of documents.

Mr. McCain portrays himself as a Washington maverick unswayed by special interests, referring recently to lobbyists as “birds of prey.” Yet in his current campaign, more than 40 fund-raisers and top advisers have lobbied or worked for an array of gambling interests — including tribal and Las Vegas casinos, lottery companies and online poker purveyors.

When rules being considered by Congress threatened a California tribe’s planned casino in 2005, Mr. McCain helped spare the tribe. Its lobbyist, who had no prior experience in the gambling industry, had a nearly 20-year friendship with Mr. McCain.

In Connecticut that year, when a tribe was looking to open the state’s third casino, staff members on the Indian Affairs Committee provided guidance to lobbyists representing those fighting the casino, e-mail messages and interviews show. The proposed casino, which would have cut into the Pequots’ market share, was opposed by Mr. McCain’s colleagues in Connecticut.

Mr. McCain declined to be interviewed. In written answers to questions, his campaign staff said he was “justifiably proud” of his record on regulating Indian gambling. “Senator McCain has taken positions on policy issues because he believed they are in the public interest,” the campaign said.

Mr. McCain’s spokesman, Tucker Bounds, would not discuss the senator’s night of gambling at Foxwoods, saying: “Your paper has repeatedly attempted to insinuate impropriety on the part of Senator McCain where none exists — and it reveals that your publication is desperately willing to gamble away what little credibility it still has.”

Over his career, Mr. McCain has taken on special interests, like big tobacco, and angered the capital’s powerbrokers by promoting campaign finance reform and pushing to limit gifts that lobbyists can shower on lawmakers. On occasion, he has crossed the gambling industry on issues like regulating slot machines.

Perhaps no episode burnished Mr. McCain’s image as a reformer more than his stewardship three years ago of the Congressional investigation into Jack Abramoff, the disgraced Republican Indian gambling lobbyist who became a national symbol of the pay-to-play culture in Washington. The senator’s leadership during the scandal set the stage for the most sweeping overhaul of lobbying laws since Watergate.

“I’ve fought lobbyists who stole from Indian tribes,” the senator said in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination this month.

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Fears of Turmoil Persist as Powerful President Reshapes Bitterly Divided Bolivia

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia — At first glance around this rebellious city, President Evo Morales seemed to have suffered a sharp setback this month. Mobs looted nearly every federal building, strewing offices with broken furniture and spraying walls with graffiti calling him a vassal of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela in explicitly racist language.

The devastation is telling of the turbulence of Bolivia’s politics these days. But it belies Mr. Morales’s gathering strength in the country at large, and the stresses it has placed on Bolivia’s wobbly democratic institutions, which he has set about recasting amid rising violence by his supporters and opponents alike.

The election of Mr. Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, in 2005 was a watershed in South America, as long-marginalized native peoples took power for the first time — through the ballot box.

Increasingly, the question confronting Bolivia, a country of deep ethnic and geographical divisions, is how they will wield that power, and whether Mr. Morales can redress the historical grievances of Bolivia’s indigenous majority while keeping his country from descending into chaos.

“It’s been half a century since Bolivia has had a president with such power and public support,” said Gonzalo Chávez, a Harvard-trained political analyst at the Catholic University of La Paz. “Now we have to see how Evo proceeds with plans for a radical reconstruction of the state and with what methods.”

Mr. Morales now faces strong — and frequently violent — protests in lowland departments that are home to most of the nation’s petroleum reserves and a European-descended elite that sees its interests as threatened.

But Mr. Morales appears more and more likely to get the constitutional changes he wants to spread land reform, create a separate legal system for indigenous groups and allow him to run for re-election, proposals that have the potential to keep him in power for the next decade.

As violent as his opponents have sometimes been, they charge that Mr. Morales is achieving much of this by running roughshod over them. They say he has ignored court rulings that challenge his policies and used some of the same intimidation tactics he honed as a leader of the powerful coca growers unions before he was elected president.

As such tactics spread on both sides, fears are growing throughout the region that Bolivia’s crisis could produce, if not civil war, then pockets of fierce conflict across its rebellious tropical lowlands, which are an important source of natural gas and food for neighboring countries.

Last week, thousands of Mr. Morales’s supporters, some wielding dynamite sticks and shotguns, marched toward Santa Cruz to press leaders here to sign an agreement on a timetable for approving the new constitution. The marchers clashed with regional officials, beating them with sticks when they tried to persuade them to disarm, before relaxing their actions.

In a veiled threat, Mr. Morales said that “peace and tranquillity” would return to economically vibrant Santa Cruz if its leaders agreed in talks under way to create a framework for putting his proposed constitution to a vote.

Mr. Morales is also pressing the lowlands to share more of their oil and gas royalties, money he is already using to alleviate some of the crushing poverty found across Bolivia, one of South America’s poorest countries.

But as Mr. Morales asserts control over federal bureaucracies, which he and his supporters say were long engineered to serve the interests of the elite, his opponents fear those same institutions are being stacked against them.

The president’s supporters also are winning key victories in Congress. And as opposition has moved to regional governors and outlying departments, Mr. Morales has sought to preserve centralized power in La Paz.

Before traveling to New York last week for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, Mr. Morales imprisoned a top opponent — Leopoldo Fernández, governor of Pando, a small Amazonian department where resistance to the central government has been strong — accusing him of ordering the massacre of more than a dozen rural workers.

At the same time, the president quelled concern about dissent in the armed forces by installing an admiral to run the department in the governor’s place during a state of siege.

Still, by adopting some of the same tactics Mr. Morales once used to destabilize previous elected governments in Bolivia, like road blockades and street protests, his opponents have found themselves on the defensive.

Mr. Morales has received the backing of neighboring governments, who fear Bolivia’s turmoil will threaten their energy supplies and want to see the conflict resolved. President Michelle Bachelet of Chile led a meeting of Unasur, a nascent political association of 12 South American countries, on Wednesday to discuss the crisis.

Without offering proof, Mr. Morales accused his critics of plotting a “civil coup” with the help of the American ambassador, Philip S. Goldberg, whom he expelled abruptly on Sept. 10.

Indeed, considerable ill will toward the United States persists in Mr. Morales’s government, particularly in relation to a United States agency called the Office of Transition Initiatives.

Washington ended the office’s operations in Bolivia last year, after dispensing grants aimed at strengthening departmental governments, which have taken the lead in opposing Mr. Morales.

“Our work with local governments — both pro-government and opposition — sought to help these governments improve their ability to deliver services to their population,” said Jose Cardenas, assistant administration for Latin America at the United States Agency for International Development, which oversees the Office of Transition Initiatives. “Any claims that our programs went beyond these purposes are baseless.”

A commanding force in Bolivian politics for decades, Washington still gives Bolivia more than $100 million a year in aid, much of it to fight the cocaine trade. Increasingly, it looks as if that money and other cooperation efforts may not survive the low point of relations between the countries.

In a move that could throw more than 10,000 jobs in Bolivia into doubt, President Bush said Friday that the United States was preparing to suspend preferences that allow Bolivian exports like textiles to enter without duties. citing a failure to cooperate in antidrug efforts.

Still, American officials, bracing for a further deterioration in ties, now seem relatively powerless to influence events here, even as Bolivia tips toward greater instability. As it moves further from Washington’s orbit, it shifts into the pull of Mr. Chávez.

“We see two revolutions playing out in Bolivia, one in the highlands that is indigenous-focused with a democratically elected leader, but at the same time with an antiglobal component,” a senior State Department official said in an interview, requesting anonymity because of the tense relations with Bolivia.

“The second revolution, in the lowlands, is for decentralized government, but quite frankly has to overcome racism,” the official continued. “What’s worrying to us is stitching these two processes together when the extremes on both sides are using violence.”

Concerns are growing over those caught in the middle of those clashes, particularly journalists covering the episodes and impoverished partisans on each side of the struggle.

Before the latest crisis, Mr. Morales was already benefiting from the opposition’s missteps, like its proposal for a referendum on his policies that was held last month. He emerged victorious with more than 67 percent of the vote, a significant increase from the 53.7 percent he garnered in presidential elections in 2005.

While governors in lowland departments emerged from the referendum with similarly strong mandates, voters recalled two of Mr. Morales’s opponents, in La Paz and Cochabamba.

Since then the intensity of the protests seems to have surprised even some opposition leaders, who now say they hope both sides can step back from the brink.

“I do not want Evo toppled in a coup,” said Branko Marinkovic, a wealthy landowner who is president of the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee, a group seeking greater autonomy for Santa Cruz from the central government. “I want Evo to finish his term while respecting our dignity in a unified Bolivia.”

On Rock Walls, Painted Prayers to Rain Gods - NYTimes.com

TWO by two, the dozen or so people in my tour group took turns lying on our backs, hands at our sides, and slowly sliding ourselves into a narrow crevice under a rocky overhang, like mechanics sliding under a car. “Don’t touch the ceiling!” our guide implored.

“It’s better if you just wriggle and scooch yourself in,” someone said helpfully as one pair tried the maneuver.

A moment later a voice from inside called out, “Oh my God, amazing!” and another yelled, “Woooowww! Incredible drawings.”

We were in Hueco Tanks State Historic Site near El Paso, Tex., and the tiny dome-shaped niche was called Umbrella Cave. Inside, we gazed upward at centuries-old images that render it a sort of miniature New World Sistine Chapel — rust-colored, graceful, haunting outlines of human and animal forms, painted on the rock as much as 800 years ago or even more.

About 2,000 rock paintings, called pictographs, are scattered over the 860 rugged acres of Hueco Tanks, offering the visitor an experience of archaeology combined with adventure that conjures up Indiana Jones. Ancient artists, working with colored paints, hid the pictures in cavities, cracks and crevices. Seeing even a small part of this abundance requires clambering over rocky mounds, crab-walking down steep slopes, sliding into irregular niches and squeezing through narrow passages.

Whether the painters planned it or not, the locations they chose served to preserve their work, protecting it from centuries of sunlight, wind and rain. As if caught in a curious cultural slipstream, many of these images remain clear and bright, offering a vivid glimpse into the psyches of people long gone.

The park’s name comes from the bowl- and hot-tub-sized craters, called huecos (Spanish for hollows or recesses) strewn over its hillsides. Partly because the huecos are natural water catchments — or “tanks,” in Texas usage — and can hold water for weeks or months, they have attracted people living or traveling in this dry climate for at least 10,000 years. Hunters and gatherers were followed by early farmers and, more recently, Mescalero Apaches, colonial Spaniards and 19th-century settlers heading west.

Hueco Tanks park, well known to rock climbers, attracts thousands of boulderers and their ilk each year, but most concentrate on their journey over the terrain without paying much attention to the pictographs hidden in it. A smaller number of travelers come with the opposite intent — ready to tackle the rocks to see the art.

On my recent trip, my group, including travelers from New Mexico, California, New Jersey and Alberta, climbed and crawled up, down and around protruding rocks, eager to see the artifacts. Our guide was Ed Woten, a volunteer who lives in Cloudcroft, N.M.

A typical guided hike (made by reservation, as the number of visitors allowed in the park, rock climbers or archaeology buffs, is limited) can last two to four hours, depending on the group’s enthusiasm. Some spots, like a rock wall at Comanche Cave, are chockablock with paintings, while others harbor a single image.

WHILE no one is certain about the type of tools used to create the arts, it’s possible that paintbrushes were made from yucca leaves or human or animal hair. Minerals served as pigments: hematite, an iron oxide, for shades of red, for example; white clay and gypsum to produce white. Binders for the paints may have been water, animal fat, egg yolk or plant juices.

However it was done, the effect is pure magic, whether it’s the expressive splendor of a starry-eyed man as he gazes down at you with greenish-blue eyes outlined in reddish brown, a conga line of chalky-white figures with arms raised in dancelike poses, or a black-and-white figure of Tlaloc, the wide- eyed Mesoamerican rain deity, with his intricate geometric-patterned torso.

“I have seen rock art before, but this is more than I’ve ever seen in one place — layers upon layers,” said Susan Doering, of Auberry, Calif., a violinist who was in the El Paso area to play several concerts with the El Paso Opera. “And, so much of it looks so fresh and bright like it was painted yesterday. It’s unbelievable.” For her, the athletic demands of the tour were a plus. “It’s great actually,” she laughed, “because I need the exercise.”

Hueco Tanks is notable not only for its sheer numbers of pictographs but also for its abundance of painted mask art designs, about 200 in all, thought to be the largest concentration of these stylized facial images in North America. At Cave Kiva, located on North Mountain, the visitor must slither like a snake over cool, smooth rock for several feet before gaining entry into the chamber. Inside, eight exquisitely painted masks, in reds and yellows, decorate the high ceiling.

“That one looks like a motorcycle guy — I love him,” someone said, pointing to a mustard-colored visage made up of thick and thin bands of paint.

“The real thing to think about is what were they thinking,” Susana Mincks of San Lorenzo, N.M., said in a hushed voice. “Were they enshrining deities, or just having a good time?”

Curious to learn more about the people who made the paintings, I paid a visit to Polly Schaafsma, an archaeologist who has studied American Indian rock art for more than 40 years and who wrote the textbook “Indian Rock Art of the Southwest” (1980). She and her husband, Curtis Schaafsma, an archaeologist, and their two dogs, Tiwa and Tewa (named for two American Indian languages) live about an hour north of Albuquerque near the rural town of Cerrillos. Both Schaafsmas are affiliated with the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe.

Different groups of Indians spanning a variety of periods and cultures left artwork at Hueco Tanks, Ms. Schaafsma told me, but a good deal of it, including the masks, is believed to have been created between A.D. 1200 and 1400 by the Jornada Mogollon (hor-NAH-da mo- goy-OWN) people.

In general, when it comes to rock art, it’s hard to know exactly why they did it. “It’s like a big puzzle, and you try and figure it out and sometimes you can and sometimes you can’t,” Ms. Schaafsma said. But at some sites researchers can identify clues.

The Jornada Mogollon were maize farmers dependent on rain for their crops, and it is believed that in their worldview, all water, rain and moisture came from underground, where deities or supernaturals lived. For these people, the overhangs, caves and catchments at Hueco Tanks would have had symbolic, religious significance.

“The fact that many pictographs were painted in secret spots is no accident,” Ms. Schaafsma said. “A lot of them are symbolically situated as communicating with the underworld.”

Much can also be gleaned from the motifs themselves. Many contain what appear to be references to clouds and lightning. And the presence of the rain god Tlaloc — when considered in the light of what is known about Kachinas, the masked supernaturals associated with contemporary Hopi and Zuni tribes — helps to bolster the notion that the mask icons were most likely prayers, perhaps petitions for rain.

Theorizing aside, Ms. Schaafsma took a moment to talk about her admiration of the masks. “I am still really astounded by their abstract sophistication,” she said. “Many people think they are stenciled, but they are not. They are very precisely painted.”

For those who don’t get enough at Hueco Tanks, about two hours north of El Paso lies another trove of ancient art, the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site not far from Alamogordo, N.M. The site contains an astonishing number of rock carvings — more than 20,000 — largely attributed to the Jornada Mogollon. Unlike the art at Hueco Tanks, these are not paintings, but were formed by scratching or pecking through the dark weathered surface to expose a lighter inner layer of rock, and they are not hidden but out in the open, decorating rock faces of all shapes and sizes. Wander off the beaten path (which is encouraged) and who knows what you’ll come across: fantastical animals, curious faces, a trail of footprints or intricate geometric patterns.

Petroglyphs like these are more common in the Southwest than painted pictographs like those at Hueco Tanks. Nevertheless, they are enchanting.

On the weekday I visited, a small crew of students and a few teachers from Colorado Springs School in Colorado were spread out along the ridge, on a two-week field trip concentrating on rock art and the cultures that created it. Part of the students’ assignment was sketching the petroglyphs.

“There are definitely some very cool ones,” said Alex Dragten, 15. “I enjoyed one of a buffalo with two arrows in its back.”

The group had been at Hueco Tanks the weekend before, and all agreed that Cave Kiva was a favorite spot. “I think the kids enjoyed Cave Kiva the most not only for the masks that were inside but for the adventure of getting there,” said their teacher Jennifer Hedden.

At Three Rivers, the experience was the opposite — a profusion of petroglyphs, readily accessible. “Rock art is just everywhere here,” she said, looking around. “It was so fun to come up the main trail this morning and hear the kids saying, ‘Look at that one’ and ‘Come over here and see this.’ ”

IF YOU GO

Hueco Tanks State Historic Site (6900 Hueco Tanks Road No. 1; 915-849-6684; www.tpwd.state.tx.us/spdest/findadest/parks/hueco_tanks) is open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday to Thursday and 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday to Sunday May through September; 8 to 6 daily October through April. Admission is $5, and picnic and camping facilities are available.

Guided pictograph tours — there are three tours, varying in difficulty — are offered at 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Because the number of visitors is limited to protect the site, reservations are strongly advised. The areas West Mountain, East Mountain and East Spur are open only to those with guides; North Mountain offers limited self-guided access. All first-time visitors are required to watch a 15-minute orientation video.

For reservations made 24 hours or more in advance, call the Austin Service Center at 512-389-8900. For next-day reservations, camping or tours call the Hueco Tanks office directly at 915-849-6684.

Three Rivers Petroglyph Site (www.blm.gov/nm/st/en/prog/recreation/las_cruces/three_rivers.html) is about 24 miles north of Alamogordo, N.M. on U.S. 54. Turn east onto County Road B30 and drive five miles following signs. The site is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.; admission is $2 a vehicle. A camp host is on the site. Information: Las Cruces District Office of the Bureau of Land Management at 575-525-4300

A Crisis Highlights Divisions in Bolivia - NYTimes.com

By SIMON ROMERO
Published: September 14, 2008
LA PAZ, Bolivia — President Evo Morales is facing the most acute crisis of his presidency as deaths from violence in rebellious northern Bolivia increased to almost 30 over the weekend. Supporters of Mr. Morales said Sunday that the death toll could rise with dozens of people caught up in the violence and still unaccounted for.

Supporters of the president stood guard at a road blockade on Sunday about 30 miles from Santa Cruz in eastern Bolivia.
Relative calm returned to the northern department of Pando on Sunday after Mr. Morales declared martial law there and troops dispatched from La Paz seized the airport and other facilities in Cobija, the departmental capital. But the threat of unrest persisted in other parts of Bolivia, and political leaders in the tropical lowlands bordering on Brazil said they would resume protests if killings in Pando continued.

Mr. Morales said that the violence was a massacre carried out partly by “Peruvian and Brazilian mercenaries” hired by the governor of Pando, Leopoldo Fernández, who went into hiding to avoid arrest. In comments to a local radio station, Mr. Fernández denied that accusation, asserting that the deaths resulted from clashes between antigovernment protesters and the president’s supporters.

On Sunday, Juan Ramón Quintana, a top aide to Mr. Morales, told a local radio station that Mr. Fernández had been arrested, The Associated Press reported.

The violence points to renewed tension over Mr. Morales’s attempts to redistribute petroleum royalties and to overhaul the Constitution to speed land reform and create a separate legal system for Bolivia’s indigenous majority. Most of Bolivia’s natural gas and food is produced in the eastern lowlands, and those departmental governments have chafed at the president’s proposals.

The polarization of the country intensified in August after Mr. Morales won 67 percent approval in a nationwide referendum over his policies, reflecting intense support for him in the rural highlands and in large cities like La Paz and Cochabamba. But governors in the eastern departments who urge greater political and economic autonomy from Mr. Morales’s government were reaffirmed in their posts with similar margins.

“You have a conflict between a constitutional national power and a de facto regional power that can only be resolved by constitutional force,” said Heinz Dieterich, a Mexico-based political analyst who writes widely on leftist movements in Latin America. “If Evo does not use the judiciary and the military, there is no way he can govern.”

Loyalty within the Bolivian military itself has been called into question, however. Gen. Luis Trigo, the top commander of the armed forces, bristled at an assertion last week by President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Mr. Morales’s top ally, that Venezuela could intervene militarily in Bolivia if Mr. Morales were toppled.

On Saturday, Mr. Chávez taunted the Bolivian military further, saying it seemed to be on strike while instability reigned in some areas. Mr. Chávez said he hoped a meeting of South American leaders convened for Monday in Santiago, the capital of Chile, could alleviate the tension.

The crisis also illustrates waning American influence in Bolivia. Last week Mr. Morales expelled Philip S. Goldberg, the American ambassador, accusing him of supporting groups seeking greater political autonomy in the lowlands. In a show of solidarity, Venezuela expelled the American ambassador in Caracas, and Honduras declined to approve the arriving American ambassador.

In Bolivia, the expulsion order came after supporters of Mr. Morales, a former coca grower, accused the American Embassy of fomenting rebellion through antidrug projects financed by the United States Agency for International Development, or Usaid, and cooperative intelligence operations established by the previous government.

“The accusations that were made against me, against the embassy, against Usaid, against my country and against my people, are completely false and unjustified,” Mr. Goldberg said Sunday before boarding a plane for the United States.

Bolivia’s neighbors are increasingly looking to Brazil to mediate between Mr. Morales and his regional opponents, even though leaders in the eastern lowlands are irked by the Brazilian president’s support for Mr. Morales. Shipments of Bolivian natural gas to Brazil were interrupted last week after saboteurs caused a pipeline explosion in the southern department of Tarija.

Santa Cruz, a lowland department that is Bolivia’s most prosperous region, was a focus of the protests last week. The most intense violence, however, flared in Pando, poor and sparsely populated in the Amazonian lowlands bordering Brazil.

Security forces sealed off air access to Pando after declaring the state of siege. Residents and travelers who managed to get out reported sporadic gunfire on the streets of Cobija even after martial law was imposed.

On Sunday, little definite was known about the killings that took place in recent days about 20 miles outside Cobija. Defense Minister Walker San Miguel said on state television that the government was working with Brazil to capture armed assailants seeking to flee across Pando’s border into the Brazilian Amazon.

The unfolding crisis reflects a polarized Bolivia with vastly different hopes and interests.

Mr. Morales’s efforts to enfranchise the long-neglected Aymara and Quechua Indians who populate the highlands depend on his ability to wrest control of petroleum royalties from the lowlands. But that more richly endowed region has shifted its attention away from the government centralized in La Paz and eastward to Brazil’s turbocharged capitalism as an inspiration for development.

In Santa Cruz, the tension appeared to ease on Sunday. Antigovernment road blockades were lifted and cars circulated freely in a city that had been immobilized for days by shortages of gasoline and diesel.

A more volatile picture emerged from Pando of the fractious Bolivia that Mr. Morales is struggling to hold together. In Filadelfia, another community rocked by violence — the town hall was burned down over the weekend — three students were reported killed.

Adriana Jurado, whose son, Wilson, was among the dead, pleaded with authorities to view his body. “I want to see my son,” a crying Ms. Jurado said in comments broadcast on the radio. Addressing Pando’s missing governor, she asked, “Leopoldo Fernández, where is my son?”

Street fights, gas disruptions assail Bolivia - International Herald Tribune

LA PAZ, Bolivia: Anti-government protesters fought backers of President Evo Morales with clubs, machetes and guns and seized natural gas fields, as Bolivia and the U.S. traded diplomatic salvos over the crisis.

At least eight people were killed Thursday and 20 injured in street fights, authorities reported.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials angered by Morales' decision to expel Washington's ambassador for allegedly inciting opposition protesters responded by kicking out Bolivia's top diplomat. Bolivian officials, however, have told U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice they wanted to maintain ties.

In a show of solidarity with his ally Morales, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave the U.S. ambassador to his country 72 hours to leave and announced the recall of Venezuela's ambassador to Washington.

A two-week protest against Morales' plans to redo the constitution and redirect gas revenues turned violent this week as demonstrators in the country's energy-rich eastern provinces stormed public offices, blocked roads and seized gas fields.

Protests have disrupted natural gas exports to Brazil — Bolivia's No. 1 customer — and apparently Argentina, as opposition groups in the provinces — Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija — fight Morales' leftist government for control of Bolivia's lucrative gas revenues.

Government opponents also are demanding Morales cancel a Dec. 7 nationwide vote on a new constitution that would help him centralize power, run for a second consecutive term and transfer fallow terrain to landless peasants from Bolivia's poor indigenous majority.

"We're going to tolerate only so much. Patience has its limits," Morales told supporters on Thursday. The Aymara Indian and former coca growers' union leader has so far hesitated to mobilize the military, fearing major bloodshed.

The eight deaths occurred in Pando outside the capital, Cobija, in a rumble between pro- and anti-government bands in a jungle region, a deputy minister for social movements, told the AP.

Argentina announced its support of the Morales administration.

"It's a government elected by popular will and you have to respect that," Argentine Justice Minister Anibal Fernandez said Friday.

The European Union has appealed to Bolivian authorities to move quickly to defuse political tensions, offering to mediate between opposing parties.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon implored Bolivians to end the violence and seek consensus, and also offered to assist in talks.

"He urges all concerned to act with restraint and to prevent any further confrontation," U.N. spokeswoman Michele Montas said Friday in New York.

Half of Bolivia's natural gas exports to Brazil were halted for nearly seven hours on Thursday because of sabotage by anti-Morales activists, according to the affected Transierra pipeline company.

And Bolivia's finance minister said gas deliveries to Brazil would be curtailed by 10 percent for up to two weeks as workers fix a pipeline ruptured by protesters. Bolivia supplies Brazil with 50 percent of its natural gas.

Brazilian state energy company Petrobras said it has adopted a contingency plan to decrease natural gas use in its units and replace gas with other fuels.

As protesters also stormed the Pocitos gas installation that supplies neighboring Argentina, plant technicians shut off gas as a precaution, an engineer there said. But the Argentine pipeline company that receives the Bolivian gas said its flow was unaffected.

The protests forced the closure of some regional airports, and American Airlines canceled all flights to Bolivia through Saturday. Company spokeswoman Martha Pantin said it expected flights to resume beginning Sunday.

Morales accused U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg of conspiring with Bolivia's conservative opposition as he ordered the envoy to leave. Goldberg met last week with Santa Cruz Gov. Ruben Costas, one of Morales' most virulent opponents.

Washington then declared Bolivian Ambassador Gustavo Guzman "persona non grata." Diplomats declared "persona non grata" are generally given 72 hours to depart.

Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca told reporters Thursday that he wrote to Rice to say that Bolivia "wishes to maintain bilateral relations."

In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez threatened military intervention if Morales were to be overthrown. "It would give us a green light to begin whatever operations are necessary to restore the people's power," he said.

Chavez expelled U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela Patrick Duddy, accusing the U.S. of "trying to do here what they were doing in Bolivia." The Venezuelan leader on Thursday accused a group of current and former military officers of trying to assassinate him and topple the government with support from the Washington, detaining several suspects for interrogation. He did not offer evidence.

U.S. officials have repeatedly denied Chavez's accusations that Washington has backed plots against him.

____

Associated Press writers Marco Sibaja in Brasilia, Brazil; Bradley Brooks in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Frank Bajak in Bogota, Colombia; Ian James in Caracas, Venezuela; and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

Sarah Palin's Record on Alaska Native and Tribal Issues

1. Palin has attacked Alaska Native Subsistence Fishing

2. Palin has attacked Alaska Native Subsistence Hunting

3. Palin has attacked Alaska Tribal Sovereignty

4. Palin has attacked Alaska Native Languages

Follow the link on the title for details on these issues.

Indians’ Water Rights Give Hope for Better Health

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: August 30, 2008

GILA RIVER INDIAN COMMUNITY, Ariz. — More than a hundred years ago, the Gila River, siphoned off by farmers upstream, all but dried up here in the parched flats south of Phoenix, plunging an Indian community that had depended on it for centuries of farming into starvation and poverty.


If that was not bad enough, food rations sent by the federal government — white flour, lard, canned meats and other sugary, processed foods — conspired with the genetic anomalies of the Indians to sow an obesity epidemic that has left the reservation with among the highest rates of diabetes in the world.

Now, after decades of litigation that produced the largest water-rights settlement ever in Indian country, the Indians here are getting some of their water back. And with it has come the question: Can a healthier lifestyle lost generations ago be restored?

Reviving the farming tradition will prove difficult, many tribal members say, because the tribes, who number 20,000, including about 12,000 on the reservation, have not farmed on a big scale for generations. Fast food is a powerful lure particularly for the young, and the trend of late has been to move off the reservation, to work or live.

“Nobody wants to get out and get dirt under their fingernails,” said Pancratious Harvey, one of a handful of tribal members who began a community garden a couple of years ago.

Still, the garden, which is filled with vegetables that were once staples in the tribe’s diet, is a sign of enthusiasm for farming that members believe could spread as the water arrives.

On the reservation, the sound of earthmovers fills the air as workers repair dilapidated and abandoned irrigation canals and ditches and dig new ones to distribute billions of gallons of water that the community will soon be receiving.

The water settlement, involving the two principal tribes on the Gila River reservation — the Pima, who call themselves Akimel O’otham, or “river people,” and the Maricopa — as well as a related band, the Tohono O’odham Nation on the Mexican border, took effect this year, after being approved by Congress in 2004.

It will take several more years to complete the irrigation and related projects here, at a cost to the federal government of about $680 million, but when done it will allow the community to double the amount of farming, both an economic and cultural boon.

For the time being, the community garden, with squash, beans and other vegetables is just over two acres. “We’re relearning how to grow them,” said Ed Mendoza, one of the founders of the garden, the Vah-Ki Cooperative Garden. “People get sick with diabetes, they’re obese, and there are heart attacks and stress because we eat an American diet now. Beans regulate the highs and lows of sugar. Okra makes you healthy. You can eat this food and feel the spirit immediately.”

Elsewhere, several members are acquiring plots in hopes of growing traditional crops as well as more profitable ones like alfalfa. Gila River Farms, the largest tribal agriculture outfit, plans to double its farming, to some 35,000 acres, once the water begins flowing again.

Most of the water was diverted in the late 19th century, slowing the Gila River to a trickle. It was a startling turn of events for a tribe whose ancestors had thrived on the river for generations through an elaborate system of ditches and laterals, some of them still visible today.

The construction of the Coolidge Dam, completed in 1928, by the federal government was intended to restore some of the lost water, but the reservation never received enough to bring back farming in any big way. Later diversions also depleted the Salt River, which runs north of the reservation and helped support farming as well.

As the water disappeared and the Pima switched to government rations as their staple, obesity, alcoholism and diabetes exploded.

Where adult-onset diabetes was hardly present a century ago, it is now everywhere and has been the subject of decades of research by government scientists. More than half of the population over 25 has it, and a rising number of children are getting it.

Scientists have found the genetic makeup of the tribe leaves it predisposed to weight gain from sugary foods. That, coupled with the decline in activity from farming and the drop in the consumption of natural foods, probably explains the high rate of the disease, said Larry Sanders, a diabetes specialist on the reservation.

He said the Pima’s sister tribe in Mexico, which has kept up farming and eating off the land, has normal rates of the disease.

The Pima had long wanted the water back and by the late 1980s, buoyed by trends in water-rights laws and a new brand of reservation-born negotiators, serious talks began.

Water claims are usually complicated, hotly disputed affairs in the warm, dry West. Add in issues of Indian rights and sovereignty and it is perhaps not surprising that it took more than 30 years to reach the settlement.


It provides the reservation 653,500 acre-feet of water a year (an acre-foot is equivalent to about one family’s water use annually) coming from a mix of sources, with the Central Arizona Project tapping the Colorado River providing the biggest share. It also includes the $680 million to rebuild the irrigation system and to provide drainage, water monitoring and other benefits.

It may seem a staggering amount of water, but federal and state officials said the reservation might have gained much more had it prevailed in court. It had asked for two million acre-feet, for one thing, based in part on documented use of the river going back to the 16th century.

“It wasn’t a matter of if the tribes would win at trial,” said Gregg Houtz, the lead lawyer for the state’s Department of Water Resources in the settlement agreement. “It was a matter of how much.”

A big reason for settling, federal and state officials said, was to provide all sides certainty and clarity over how much water they will have now and in the coming decades. The reservation had already received or been promised about two-thirds of the water in the settlement, but, Mr. Houtz said, the additional water makes the Gila River Indians major water brokers as they lease some of it to cities and could vault the tribe to the top of farming in the state as well.

The reservation has discussed farming some 150,000 acres, 40 percent of its 372,000 acres, but it is planning to avoid large housing developments.

Said Rodney B. Lewis, the community’s former general counsel who helped negotiate the settlement, “we will be an island” amid suburban Phoenix’s sea of subdivisions.

The Gila River itself will remain largely dry; the water from the settlement will be delivered and distributed through a system of culverts and canals.

And it will take much effort to reverse the legacy of poor health, though programs abound, intended for the young and the old, to combat diabetes. Medical officials are particularly alarmed at a rise in the rate of the disease among the young.

Georgina Charles, 74, a diabetes sufferer, attends a regular exercise class for the elderly and says she watches what she eats, but acknowledges that she and others find it difficult to ignore detrimental food. One recent night she prepared traditional fry bread for a community event, substituting vegetable oil for the usual lard but laughing at the obvious.

“It’s not too good for us, but we eat it,” Ms. Charles said.

Just a few miles away, the community gardeners adjusted hoses as the weekly delivery of water arrived and took stock of their crops. The water they use comes from an underground aquifer, but they are contemplating how they might tap into the settlement water and promote natural foods.

Schoolchildren visit the garden and some of its produce ends up on tables at community functions but, members said, more needs to be done to take full advantage of the water.

“When we lost that water, we lost generations of farming,” said Janet Haskie, a community gardener. “Then people had the attitude like, ‘They owe us. I’m going to take these rations.’ So now we have to start over again, a little at a time.”

Aurelius Piper Sr., 92, Paugussett Tribe Chief, Is Dead - Obituary (Obit)

TRUMBULL, Conn. (AP) — Aurelius H. Piper Sr., hereditary chief of the Golden Hill Paugussett Indian Tribe, died on Aug. 3 at the tribe’s reservation in Trumbull. He was 92.

His death was announced by tribal officials.

Mr. Piper, known as Big Eagle, was named chief in 1959 by his mother, Chieftess Rising Star, and later assumed responsibility for the tribe’s quarter-acre reservation in Trumbull.

Though small, the tribe, which has small reservations in Trumbull and Colchester, has been recognized by the State of Connecticut for more than 300 years. In 2004, however, the Bureau of Indian Affairs rejected the tribe’s request for federal recognition.

In the fight to be recognized, the Paugussetts filed claims to more than 700,000 acres of land, setting off a flurry of legal challenges. The land claims, which stretched from Middletown to Wilton and from Greenwich through lower Westchester County in New York, were eventually dropped, but could have been revived if the tribe had received federal recognition.

In 1993, Mr. Piper’s son Kenneth, also known as Moonface Bear, was the central figure in a 10-week armed standoff between state police and the Colchester faction of the tribe, over the sale of untaxed cigarettes on the reservation. Kenneth Piper died in 1996.

Mr. Piper traveled the world as a representative of the Golden Hill Tribe, Native Americans and other minority groups.

He served on many boards and commissions throughout Connecticut, fighting for the rights of American Indians and other minorities. He also served as a spiritual adviser to Native Americans in prison.

Mr. Piper served in the United States military during World War II, and took part in the troop landings in North Africa, according to the tribe.

He is survived by his wife, the former Marsha Conte; five children; and several stepchildren, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Recall Vote in Bolivia Seen as Win for Morales - NYTimes.com

By SIMON ROMERO
Published: August 10, 2008
COCHABAMBA, Bolivia — President Evo Morales seemed to have secured an easy victory in a recall referendum on Sunday, giving him a fresh mandate to advance efforts to redistribute petroleum royalties and private farmlands among the country’s impoverished indigenous majority.

Indigenous women stood in line to vote near the capital, La Paz. Mr. Morales seemed on his way to an easy victory in a recall referendum.
Reports on national television, citing preliminary vote counts, said that Mr. Morales, a former coca farmer whose pro-indigenous policies and alliance with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela have irritated the Bush administration, had won the referendum with 63.5 percent supporting his administration.

Mr. Morales won the presidency in 2005 with 53.7 percent of the vote.

While the early results pointed to strong support for Mr. Morales, they also revealed deep rifts in Bolivia, with voters rejecting by wide margins his policies in three prosperous lowland provinces and in Sucre, the seat of the judiciary. By contrast, Mr. Morales, an Aymara Indian, appeared to win handily in highland provinces where poor, indigenous voters predominate.

“More conflict seems to be forthcoming unless the government is wise enough to enter into dialogue” with Mr. Morales’s opponents, said Eduardo A. Gamarra, a Bolivian political scientist at Florida International University. “Given the history of conflict over the past two years, I don’t see this as occurring in the near term.”

Indeed, Mr. Morales seemed to show mixed interest in reconciliation while casting his vote Sunday morning near his small coca farm in the Chapare, a coca-growing area in central Bolivia. He told reporters that he would soon ask voters to approve a new Constitution, which would polarize the nation and has been rejected as illegally drafted by political opponents.

“We are deepening the process of change under way,” Mr. Morales said later Sunday. But he also said that he would respect the vote in areas where he lost.

In the days leading up the vote, protesters blockaded airport runways and prevented Mr. Morales from traveling to several regional capitals, reflecting the repudiation of his policies in petroleum-rich provinces, called departments, like Tarija and Santa Cruz. One opposition bastion, Sucre, has mounted a seemingly quixotic campaign to be named the country’s capital.

Heinz Dieterich, a political analyst in Mexico who writes widely on leftist movements in Latin America, summed up Mr. Morales’s situation as being “an exile in the majority of the provinces of his own land.”

“The de facto division of Bolivia into two countries” continues, Mr. Dieterich said in a recent essay, “until one of the two antagonistic powers is in a condition to deliver the decisive blow, to liquidate the other.”

The referendum originated in May in what now seems to be a self-defeating effort to remove Mr. Morales from office by Podemos, an opposition party whose influence has eroded.

Many voters here in Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third-largest city and the scene last year of street battles between the president’s followers and his critics, appeared ready to support Mr. Morales going forward, though with some hesitance.

“I don’t support all of his ideas, but Evo is our first indigenous president and should be given the chance to finish his term,” said Yovana Vélez, 25, a publicist. “The last thing we need is more upheaval, more chaos.”

Mr. Morales, 48, appears ready to use the referendum to proceed with policies that have enraged his political opponents, like the acceptance of tens of millions of dollars from Venezuela.

Over the weekend, Mr. Morales’s government said it had secured $225 million in financing from Venezuela and Iran to create a state cement company. The move would deal a blow to a top political rival who controls much of the country’s cement output.

The prefects, or governors, in several rebellious departments have a sharply different view of how Bolivia should develop. Their continuance in office was also part of the referendum on Sunday, with at least three of them winning by a wider margin than the president.

Some opposition leaders also showed little desire for reconciliation. “No to the big foreign monkeys!” Rubén Costas, governor of eastern Santa Cruz, shouted in a televised speech Sunday night, revealing some the racist language used to refer to Venezuela.

While these departments have stopped short of secession in recent months, they have moved forward with votes on statutes seeking greater autonomy, arguing with Mr. Morales over everything from the distribution of natural gas revenues to control over regional police forces.

Perhaps the most contentious issue has been Mr. Morales’s land reform project in Santa Cruz, the economically vibrant eastern department. Rich landowning families in the area have clashed with government officials seeking to distribute their landholdings to Aymara and Quechua Indian migrants.

Despite the apparent victories by some opposition governors, Mr. Morales’s hand was strengthened by the seeming defeat of two governors, in the capital, La Paz, and here in Cochabamba. Another governor, a supporter of Mr. Morales in Oruro department, also lost. Under the rules of the referendum, Mr. Morales can appoint their successors.

Signaling how the referendum may reignite tensions, the governor of Cochabamba, Manfred Reyes, said the referendum itself was unconstitutional. “I go on being prefect of Cochabamba,” said Mr. Reyes on Sunday night.

Op-Ed Contributor - Broken Justice in Indian Country - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

By N. BRUCE DUTHU
Published: August 10, 2008
White River Junction, Vt.

ONE in three American Indian women will be raped in their lifetimes, statistics gathered by the United States Department of Justice show. But the odds of the crimes against them ever being prosecuted are low, largely because of the complex jurisdictional rules that operate on Indian lands. Approximately 275 Indian tribes have their own court systems, but federal law forbids them to prosecute non-Indians. Cases involving non-Indian offenders must be referred to federal or state prosecutors, who often lack the time and resources to pursue them.

The situation is unfair to Indian victims of all crimes — burglary, arson, assault, etc. But the problem is greatest in the realm of sexual violence because rapes and other sexual assaults on American Indian women are overwhelmingly interracial. More than 80 percent of Indian victims identify their attacker as non-Indian. (Sexual violence against white and African-American women, in contrast, is primarily intraracial.) And American Indian women who live on tribal lands are more than twice as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted as other women in the United States, Justice Department statistics show.

Rapes against American Indian women are also exceedingly violent; weapons are used at rates three times that for all other reported rapes.

Congress should step in and clearly establish the authority of Indian tribes to investigate and prosecute all crimes occurring on Indian lands — no matter whether tribal members or nonmembers are involved.

Historically, Indian tribes have exercised full authority over everyone within Indian lands. A number of the early federal treaties expressly noted a tribe’s power to punish non-Indians. Toward the latter part of the 19th-century, however, federal policy shifted away from tribal self-government in favor of an effort to dismantle tribal government systems. Criminal law enforcement, especially in cases involving non-Indians, increasingly came to be viewed as a federal or state matter.

Thirty years ago, the Supreme Court formalized the prohibition against tribes prosecuting non-Indians with its decision in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe. In this case, a Pacific Northwest tribe was attempting to try two non-Indian residents of the Port Madison Reservation for causing trouble during the annual Chief Seattle Days celebration — one for assaulting an officer and resisting arrest and the other for recklessly endangering another person and harming tribal property. The court held that the tribe, as a “domestic dependent nation,” did not possess the full measure of sovereignty enjoyed by states and the national government, especially when it came to the affairs of non-Indian citizens.

Then in 1990, the court extended its Oliphant ruling to cases involving tribal prosecution of Indian offenders who are not members of that tribe. Congress subsequently passed new legislation to reaffirm the power of tribes to prosecute non-member Indian offenders, but it left the Oliphant ruling intact.

This means that when non-Indian men commit acts of sexual violence against Indian women, federal or state prosecutors must fill the jurisdictional void. But law enforcement in sexual violence cases in Indian country is haphazard at best, recent studies show, and it rarely leads to prosecution and conviction of non-Indian offenders. The Department of Justice’s own records show that in 2006, prosecutors filed only 606 criminal cases in all of Indian country. With more than 560 federally recognized tribes, that works out to a little more than one criminal prosecution for each tribe.

Even if outside prosecutors had the time and resources to handle crimes on Indian land more efficiently, it would make better sense for tribal governments to have jurisdiction over all reservation-based crimes. Given their familiarity with the community, cultural norms and, in many cases, understanding of distinct tribal languages, tribal governments are in the best position to create appropriate law enforcement and health care responses — and to assure crime victims, especially victims of sexual violence, that a reported crime will be taken seriously and handled expeditiously.

Congress should enact legislation to overrule the Oliphant decision and reaffirm the tribes’ full criminal and civil authority over all activities on tribal lands. This law should also lift the sentencing constraints imposed in 1968 that restrict the criminal sentences that tribal courts can impose to one year in jail and a $5,000 fine. In cases of rape, state court sentences typically exceed 8 years, while federal sentences are more than 12 years. Tribes should have the latitude to impose comparable sanctions. (A bill pending in Congress would extend tribal sentencing authority to three years, with more latitude in cases of domestic violence, but its prospects of passage are uncertain.)

Congress recently allocated $750 million for enhancing public safety in Indian country. This money will help tribes hire and train more police, build detention facilities and augment federal investigative and prosecutorial capacity for Indian country crimes. Ideally, the grant process will be efficient enough to make sure that this money reaches the places most in need.

But financial aid will not be enough to stop sexual violence against Indian women. Tribal courts have grown in sophistication over the past 30 years, and they take seriously the work of administering justice. Congress must support their efforts by closing the legal gaps that allow violent criminals to roam Indian country unchecked.

N. Bruce Duthu, a professor of Native American studies at Dartmouth, is the author of “American Indians and the Law.”

Indians Gain a Slim Victory in Suit Against Government - NYTimes.com

DENVER — For decades, American Indians have argued that the federal government swindled them under a trust account system created in the closing days of the American frontier more than 120 years ago.

On Thursday, a federal judge agreed, up to a point.

The judge, James Robertson of Federal District Court in Washington, ruled that the plaintiffs, however much they had prevailed in proving government failure, were entitled to only a fraction of the billions of dollars they sought. Judge Robertson said that trust law is applied differently to government trustees than it would be to private citizens, and that instead of the $48 billion that the descendants of the original trust holders claimed, the government was only liable for about $455 million.

“He basically accepted the government’s argument that not that much money is missing,” said Bill McAllister, a spokesman for the plaintiffs, who are led by a member of the Blackfoot tribe in Montana, Elouise Pepion Cobell. “He rejected our methodology and our theory of the case.”

Ms. Cobell said in a statement that lawyers were studying whether to appeal. Lawyers representing the Interior Department, the defendant, did not return a telephone call.

Judge Robertson did not actually order the government to pay; hearings on that question are scheduled for later this month. And he was scathing at times in describing how the case had illuminated government mismanagement, including a long trail of lost or destroyed records about money owed to Indians for timber leases, oil leases and other activities.

“Historical wrongs,” the judge wrote, “could have been — and should have been — settled by the same political branches in recognition of their own failure.”

But the judge disagreed with the argument by lawyers for an estimated 500,000 descendants of the original trust holders, who argued that the accounting should factor in how much the government improperly gained — by using the Indian money for its own benefit, in lower borrowing costs or interest earned, for example — over decades.

The class-action suit was filed in 1996 after other suits by Indian descendants were dismissed.

Energy Boom in West Threatens Indian Artifacts - NYTimes.com

DOLORES, Colo. — The dusty documentation of the Anasazi Indians a thousand years ago, from their pit houses and kivas to the observatories from which they charted the heavens, lies thick in the ground near here at Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.

Or so archaeologists believe. Less than a fifth of the park has been surveyed for artifacts because of limited federal money.

Much more definite is that a giant new project to drill for carbon dioxide is gathering steam on the park’s eastern flank. Miles of green pipe snake along the roadways, as trucks ply the dirt roads from a big gas compressor station. About 80 percent of the monument’s 164,000 acres is leased for energy development.

The consequences of energy exploration for wildlife and air quality have long been contentious in unspoiled corners of the West. But now with the urgent push for even more energy, there are new worries that history and prehistory — much of it still unexplored or unknown — could be lost.

At Nine Mile Canyon in central Utah, truck exhaust on a road to the gas fields is posing a threat, environmentalists and Indian tribes say, to 2,000 years of rock art and imagery. In Montana, a coal-fired power plant has been proposed near Great Falls on one of the last wild sections of the Lewis and Clark trail. In New Mexico, a mining company has proposed reopening a uranium mine on Mount Taylor, a national forest site sacred to numerous Indian tribes.

“We’re caught in the middle between traditional culture and archaeological research and the valid existing rights of the oil and gas leaseholders,” said LouAnn Jacobson, an archaeologist by training and the manager of both the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and the Anasazi Heritage Center here in the four-corners area, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico touch.

Nationally, only about 20 percent of the 193-million-acre national forest system has been surveyed for historical or cultural content, according to a recent report by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. At the federal Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 261 million acres, including the monument here, the figure is only 3 percent.

Heightened awareness of the risk to historic sites has been fueled in part by the growing number of retirees like John Gwin who have flocked to retreats like Durango and Pagosa Springs in Colorado. Mr. Gwin, a burley former F.B.I. agent who has dedicated his retirement to the study and stewardship of the Anasazi landscape, said the region’s mix of ancient past and verdant nature was unmatched anywhere in his travels.

“I enjoy being out there, being quiet and appreciating the people who lived there 1,000 years ago — imagining what Chimney Rock meant to them,” said Mr. Gwin, who leads tours as an unpaid volunteer for the federal Forest Service at the Chimney Rock Archaeological Area, about an hour east of here.

But population growth has also brought people who are not so reverent. Instances of vandalism and illegal raids for relics — as more footprints are found leading out into once-silent Indian mounds — have risen sharply in the last few years, though few offenders are caught.

Federal land managers, tribal leaders and archaeologists call it piling on. Energy companies build roads for access to their drill pads. But then expanding populations, many of them riding off-road vehicles, use those roads for exploration or exploitation. What was once remote becomes less so, and harder than ever to defend for future generations.

“Multiple use worked for a while, but now the uses are in the same place,” said Terry Morgart, a legal researcher for the Hopi tribe in Arizona. “You can’t have recreation, cultural resources, energy development and cell towers all on the same spot. I think the agencies are aware of these conflicts, but because they’re stuck with these archaic laws, they’re between a rock and a hard place.”

Indian leaders, who link modern tribal populations in the Southwest to the ancestral Anasazi, have mounted a campaign to stop the local exploration for carbon dioxide, which would be used to help rejuvenate old oil fields that are now stirring to life in Texas and elsewhere as oil prices soar.

“Fencing dozens of sites for the facilitation of energy development is not what we had in mind when we supported the designation of the monument,” said Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, the director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, in a letter in April to federal agencies.

Ways and (Russell) Means - washingtonpost.com

Over four decades, Russell Means has led an insurrection, posed for Andy Warhol, aspired to be an assassin and been arguably the most influential public figure in fighting racism against the American Indian. Now, in his quest to start his own country, the road to success might run down Embassy Row.

By Bill Donahue
Sunday, June 29, 2008; Page W08
The voice was booming and imperious as it came out of the bathroom, wafting over the blandly hip decor of the Dupont Circle hotel room. "If you excuse me a moment," said Russell Means, "I'm going to braid my hair."

I knew that Means was not talking about some quick twist-and-tie ponytail job, but rather the painstaking culmination of a resplendent costume. Means is 6-foot-1, with a powerful broad-boned physique. He is the actor who played the last Mohican in the 1992 film "The Last of the Mohicans," and he is the onetime leader of the revolutionary American Indian Movement, or AIM. Arguably the most famous living Indian activist, he performs his role with panache. Already on this bright, cold morning in February, he was wearing dangling turquoise earrings, a crimson wool Navajo vest and black silver-tipped cowboy boots. His broad, truculent brow was creased with wear.

Means's life has been something like a Johnny Cash song. He has done prison time for inciting a riot, and has been stabbed, accused of murder, hit by two bullets and divorced four times. Long ago, he was a fancy dance champion and a rodeo star. Even now, at age 68, he remains a forceful presence -- a warrior.

On this visit to the nation's capital, Means was, per usual, fighting the United States of America. Along with three other Lakota Indians, he had recently severed his ties with the United States and declared himself a founding member of a new, autonomous nation -- the Republic of Lakotah. Unsanctioned by their tribal government, and speaking only for themselves, the dissidents claimed dominion over more than 93,000 square miles of traditional Lakota territory -- a continuous chunk of sparsely populated dry land that includes parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

Means was here in Washington seeking diplomatic recognition from the world community so that he could ultimately finagle a seat at the United Nations, whether the U.S. of A. likes it or not. His motto, borrowed from Gandhi, is, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

The plan was to barnstorm Embassy Row. He hoped to visit ambassadors from several U.S. adversaries (Venezuela and Serbia, for instance) as well as from a few other countries he deemed likely allies -- for instance, Bolivia, which has an indigenous president in Evo Morales, and Finland, which, in Means's view, "appreciates freedom because it's always been an independent ally of Russia."

It would be a four-day mission, and Means was traveling with an attache, Lakotah's volunteer attorney general, Jerry Collette. A Libertarian activist and a paralegal who recently emigrated to Lakotah from his longtime home in North Carolina, Collette is most renowned for the intricate, loopholing legal work he did last winter to enable the supporters of presidential candidate Ron Paul to fly a campaign blimp up and down the East Coast. Ethnically French-Canadian, Collette is 56 years old, with long gray hair and a shaggy gray beard. In contrast to Means, he is a meager physical presence -- slender and only 5-foot-4. On this road trip, as Means luxuriated on the hotel's single queen bed, Collette was sleeping on the floor. "I'm a guerrilla," he explained, "and if you're a guerrilla, you just don't grumble about little discomforts."

At the moment, Collette was standing outside the bathroom, valet-like, reporting on the progress he'd made that morning, canvassing embassies on his cellphone. "I called Iceland," he said, "and they can't meet with us. They're busy. They said to just drop off a petition."

"They're busy?" Means asked. "What does Iceland have to be busy about?"

Collette paused a moment, and then, without answering, he said, "But can we just drop off the petition?"

"We're too busy," Means said, his voice laced with a larksome, sardonic swagger, and Collette went back to his phone, squaring away the logistics for a full afternoon of visiting embassies.

After a few minutes, Means emerged. His braids were done, and now he reached for his sunglasses -- Dolce & Gabbanas.

Young American Indians Find Their Voice in Poetry - NYTimes.com

SANTA FE, N.M. — The memories of long summers spent on Navajo land as a little boy have stayed with Nolan Eskeets, like the words his grandfather spoke from his deathbed.

“Up, little one,” his grandfather said to him in Navajo, a language Nolan did not understand.

Now a barrel-chested 18-year-old, with a rush of long brown hair, Nolan summons these memories — the days herding sheep through the valleys, the redolence of fresh fry bread, the unfamiliar language of his grandfather — whenever he picks up a pen.

Nolan will use that pen and his baritone when he competes this summer in the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival in Washington, D.C. He and a group of fellow students at the Santa Fe Indian School are part of a growing program that has won a slew of local and regional poetry slams and twice earned an invitation to the festival, which pits teams of the country’s top young spoken word poets against one another.

While Nolan and his teammates do not hail from the gritty urban surroundings that are often a breeding ground for slam poetry, where poets are judged on both performance and writing, their team is drawing national attention for its decidedly American Indian take on an art form that has grown increasingly popular with young people over the last decade.

The success of the Indian School’s poetry program has particular importance in New Mexico, where 10 percent of the population is American Indian and where Indian students from grades 3 to 11 lag behind all other groups in reading proficiency, according to a 2007 state report.

Teachers and administrators at the Indian School say the program counters any perception that Indian students cannot excel in English and writing.

“Tears dance down my cheeks in the rhythm of Santo Domingo’s corn dance/Tattered textbooks and Presbyterian Bibles bark violent incantations and shriek curses of assimilation,” thundered April Chavez, a senior reciting her poem “Indian Education” at a recent rehearsal.

April, whose family comes from the Santo Domingo pueblo and the Navajo nation, plans to attend Stanford in the fall. Like other students on the Santa Fe team, she often wraps her poems in the pulsing staccato of Indian words.

“For the kids, spoken word is a reconnection with the oral tradition, a return to the origin of language, its sound, its music,” said Tim McLaughlin, a creative writing teacher at the school and the team’s coach.

Mr. McLaughlin began the program at the Indian School, a sprawling Indian-run boarding institution with some 700 students in grades 7 through 12, many from New Mexico’s 19 pueblos and the Navajo nation.

He remembers well the challenge of getting his students, many more reserved than the typical teenager and “brought up to be listeners first,” to write about their lives at home.

Topics that might make for powerful poetry — ceremonies, families, the complexities of their identity — seemed off limits.

“The kids wanted to build awareness about issues that are confronting native people, but they had to balance that by not violating things that are considered sacred and are to be left sacred,” Mr. McLaughlin said

Mr. McLaughlin, who is white and from Virginia, said he occasionally found himself on the phone with a student’s parent or grandparent, to make sure it was acceptable for a particular subject to be addressed in a poem.

Gradually, as the students grew emboldened by their work, themes began to emerge — the loss of language, the legacy of the reservation and pueblo and, especially, their relationship with their grandparents.

Soon, students were bellowing poems about what it was like to grow up Indian. “Nali,” a poem by Santana Shorty, a bubbly freshman mostly raised by her white mother and with little connection to reservation life before Indian School, recalls Santana’s worn memory of her grandmother, who spoke no English, speaking to her in Navajo, which Santana did not understand.

“Her words nourish and sting me simultaneously,” Santana recited. “I struggle and cry to her with my eyes/A crease of ‘I’m sorry’ spreads across her forehead.”

The poems impressed James Kass, the founder and executive director of Youth Speaks, which produces the festival. Mr. Kass invited the team to participate in 2007 after hearing about them from Mr. McLaughlin, and he recalled seeing the students mesmerize a packed crowd at a San Francisco slam last year.

“They did a good portion of their poems in their native languages, which was amazing,” he said. “They weren’t trying to mimic poets from New York or Chicago.”

After failing to advance past the quarterfinal round last year, the Santa Fe team is poised for a stronger showing next month. They will be the only exclusively American Indian team among the 44 competing. An HBO camera crew has been following the students as they prepare and will be there to record the final competition as part of a documentary.

For the students, though, there is something more meaningful at stake: the expression of who they are to all who will listen.

At a recent performance in Santa Fe, Nolan Eskeets performed a poem, “Letter to Grandpa.” In it, he speaks of never learning Navajo, despite a promise to his grandfather, and of his painful struggle to pronounce his own Indian name.

In the end, Nolan writes that the poem itself has finally allowed him to use his language in a way that would have made his grandfather proud.

“Grandpa,” Nolan concludes, “Let me sing for you.”

After the performance, Nolan’s usually stoic father grew emotional. He strode up to Nolan and clasped his hand.

“Thank you,” he told his son in Navajo.

Be sure to see the Multimedia feature of the students reciting their poetry at
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/06/17/us/20080617_SLAM_FEATURE.html