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Post by mdenney on Jan 29, 2007 1:29:03 GMT -5
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Post by mdenney on Jan 31, 2007 18:41:19 GMT -5
Military Commissions Act raises painful memories Email this page Print this page Posted: October 06, 2006 by: Editors Report / Indian Country Today Ghosts of Sioux warriors surround the controversy on the Military Commissions Act, 38 of them to be precise. They offer a warning that should not be ignored. On June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the type of tribunal the Bush administration intended to use for terrorist trials. On Sept. 29, Congress passed a fix that met the court's objections but left civil libertarians very nervous. The issues are an eerie echo of the debate over one of the most notorious of these tribunals, which 154 years ago ordered the largest mass execution in U.S. history. This was the military commission of Col. Henry Sibley, which tried and condemned alleged participants in the Minnesota Sioux uprising of 1862. The conflict erupted in August 1862 after a decade in which four Dakota tribes had been pushed from their southern Minnesota territory into reservations along the Minnesota River. Social dislocation was intensified by the corruption of Indian agents and traders. Discontent came to a head when annuity payments were late, and traders in the Lower Agency refused to distribute provisions on credit. An apparently spontaneous murder of a white settler family by a group of young Dakota forced the chiefs of the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute to take up arms. (The Dakota tribes further north opposed the war.) In the first week of fighting, the Dakota forced settlers out of the southwestern Minnesota frontier and laid siege to Fort Ridgely and the town of New Ulm. Some 250 settlers were dead. Most were relatively innocent, aside from occupying former Dakota land, but some killings were targeted. The Indian trader Andrew Myrick had withheld provisions from the tribes, saying, ''So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry, let them eat grass.'' He died in the first attacks, and his mouth was stuffed with grass. By September, however, U.S. forces had gathered under Sibley. After some initial losses, they gained the upper hand at the Battle of Wood Lake on Sept. 23, defeating up to 1,200 Dakota warriors. Almost immediately, Sibley appointed a five-member military commission to conduct summary trials of the prisoners. This kind of military court was relatively new. It originated in 1847 during the Mexican war to conduct trials in occupied territory. But the controversy over Sibley's commission continues to this day. The military court conducted 393 trials over six weeks, hearing up to 40 cases a day as its pace accelerated. Most defendants were convicted in minutes if they admitted picking up arms. The men conducting the trials were not necessarily Indian-haters, but they admitted still feeling the emotion of the conflict. Much of the fact-finding was done by the Dakota-speaking congregational missionary Stephen Riggs, who devoted most of his life to what he saw as the best interests of the Sioux people. Yet the court sentenced 303 Dakota warriors to die by hanging. National and local opinion was intensely hostile to the Dakota. It saw the uprising in the middle of the Civil War as a stab in the back, much as the English regarded the Irish Easter Rebellion of 1916 in the midst of World War I. Federal soldiers actually had to defend the Dakota prison camp against vigilante mobs. But one or two voices protested the conduct of the trials. The Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota Henry Benjamin Whipple, an advocate of Indian reform, met personally with President Abraham Lincoln. Among other things, he argued that the defendants should have been treated as prisoners of war. By his own account, Lincoln was deeply impressed. He had the list of condemned warriors pared down to those accused of actual massacres and spared those who had merely participated in battle. But in the end, 38 were hanged in Mankato, Minn., on Dec. 26 in a single mass execution, to the cheers of thousands of spectators. This history gives a chilling perspective to the recent expansion of the reach of military commissions. In the universal outrage over the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration invoked extraordinary powers to deal with real and suspected terrorists. It set up internment at the leased Naval station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on legal advice that it was likely out of the reach of a federal court writ of habeus corpus. (Alternative prison sites on Midway, Wake Island or Tinian Atoll in the Pacific were rejected when it turned out they were in the jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court of Hawaii.) President Bush convened the military commissions by invoking his general war power. His commission order set up unique procedures, such as denying defendants access to the evidence against them, that aren't allowed in constitutional courts nor, apparently, under the ''law of war''. The Supreme Court called a halt on June 28 in its ruling on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. This historic, but rather technical decision, said that since the commissions weren't strictly enforcing the ''law of war,'' they needed to be authorized by Congress. An administration compromise with Sen. John Warner and Sen. John McCain has just produced that authorization. The initial response in some quarters has come close to hysterics. We've seen claims the republic is coming to an end and that American citizens are falling under military control. This kind of exaggerated rhetoric will unfortunately discredit some very serious concerns. The American public does feel itself under attack. Some of the detainees are undoubtedly evil and dangerous enemies. Bush plays a strong card when he lists the attacks he says have been averted by the interrogation of figures like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mysterious alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. But history warns that no matter how serious the apparent threat or how deep the public emotion, an open-ended response will do its own sort of damage, which in the end will be even greater. Indian country is very much part of the war on terror, as we have shown among the skyscrapers of New York City and on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. But in this indefinite conflict, it's crucial to keep an eye on what we are defending. The ''ideological struggle of the 21st century,'' as Bush has taken to calling it, makes sense if we are the ones preserving institutions of law, justice and moderation. We begin to lose the fight if we allow ourselves to be tricked into compromising these very institutions. The aftermath of the Sioux uprising showed how easily military commissions can be abused, even by reputable men. This lesson should not be forgotten. LINK BELOW- indiancountrytoday.com/content.cfm?id=1096413781
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Post by mdenney on Jan 31, 2007 18:49:41 GMT -5
Beyond sovereignty Posted: September 07, 2006 by: Editors Report / Indian Country Today The need for Native formulations James Sappier, chairman of the Penobscot Indian Tribe in Maine, often lets loose a provocative statement; and he did not disappoint some time back at a conference on tribal sovereignty. Sappier marveled at the spelling of the term that seems almost indispensable for discussing Indian rights. ''It has an 'e' and an 'i' - and look, there's a 'g' in it too. It's a scary word.'' As Sappier was indicating, the term ''sovereignty'' has origins far removed from Indian country. It's ironic that so much of the discussion of Native rights in our contemporary society uses terms derived from 16th century French political theory. The fact is that the 16th century French principle only approximates the rights of tribal survival and self-determination that Indian country upholds with near unanimity. As Beverly Wright, former chairman of the Aquinnah Wampanoag, said at the same conference, ''We knew this in our hearts before we knew there was a word for it.'' The question that some are asking, starting with the late Vine Deloria Jr. and continuing with Indian lawyers confronted by a hostile Supreme Court, is whether ''sovereignty'' is exactly the right word. Is there another formulation that will resonate more persuasively with the mainstream society and explain more clearly what American Indians are struggling to defend? Deloria warned that by relying too heavily on the word ''sovereignty,'' Indian country left itself vulnerable to the snares and hidden meanings that European history has embedded in the term. As many tribes discovered in their dealings with Europeans, the terms of negotiations often turned out to have unexpected meanings. What lawyers now call ''terms of art'' had implications not obvious on their surface which resulted in depriving the tribes of far more than they meant to give up. ''Sovereignty'' is one of those words. It has gone through significant changes in European and American usage. It's important just for self-defense to have some sense of the way the term has evolved. Historians trace the theory of sovereignty to the French jurist Jean Bodin (1530? - 1596). This writer was himself a bundle of contradictions. In his youth he narrowly escaped condemnation as a heretic, but he ended his life as a stalwart member of the Catholic League. He wrote one of the first tracts on religious toleration, but he also compiled a study of demonology that became a manual for witchcraft trials. He is known as an advocate of absolute monarchy, but his doctrine imposed significant limits on the French king. Sovereignty, as Bodin described it in his ''Six books of the Commonwealth,'' was actually a reaction against earlier constitutional theory derived from Aristotle, which held that the most effective form of government was a mixture of the three basic regimes: democracy, aristocracy and monarchy. Bodin objected that having three different principles of government in one state was a recipe for civil war. The state had to acknowledge one source of authority. The ultimate source was God, the ruler of the universe. The French king could claim to rule as an agent of divine authority, but he had to acknowledge that he was subordinate to divine right and limited by the rights that the Almighty had implanted in humanity (including the individual's right to property). In other matters, however, the state was the sole sovereign. (This doctrine transformed the earlier understanding of the three basic regimes. Instead of contending principles of government, they shrank to the status of functions of the single sovereign. The civics textbook description of the executive, legislative and judicial functions of the American Constitution traces back to this transmutation.) But too many different interests were burgeoning in European society to sit content with a divine right of kings, the doctrine into which Bodin's theory degenerated. Religious and social struggles in England erupted in the epic conflict of Parliament and King Charles I and the search for a new basis of sovereignty. It was supplied by John Locke (1632 - 1704). His ''Two Treatises of Government'' appeared in 1689 after England's Glorious Revolution and the final ascendancy of Parliament. He located sovereignty not in God, but in the consent of the governed. There is a fascinating interplay between European contact with American Indians and the doctrine of the state of nature that Locke used as the basis for his social compact. It generally worked to the disadvantage of the Indians. But the doctrine of the social compact has possibilities for the tribes that we will return to. It is certainly preferable to what comes after. Even though Locke's theory of sovereignty still holds sway in the United States, European thinkers began to reject it in the early 20th century. A major change took place with a German theorist named Carl Schmitt (1888 - 1985), who according to some still has surprising influence. Schmitt and his school of political realists dismissed parliamentary government as a facade for the real sources of power. Constitutional law was a deception. The real source of sovereignty was the state power that remained when the illusions of representative institutions were swept aside. His doctrine, a sort of ''last man standing'' theory of sovereignty, is said to inspire the realpolitik school of international relations. Some legal critics even see his influence in the Bush administration's assertions of sweeping executive authority in fighting terrorism. The trouble is that Schmitt was an unrepentant apologist for the destruction of the Weimar regime in Germany and the rise of Hitler. He was one of a handful of serious political theorists and philosophers who lent their prestige to a thoroughly evil political movement. All minorities have common cause in fighting movements that deny basic human rights and scapegoat entire groups of people because of their identities. But it's important to identify the sources of evil long before the ''miner's canary'' gives its ultimate warning. The phenomenon that concerns us here is that basic terms begin to change their meanings. The foundation of ''sovereignty'' changes from divine right to consent of the governed to seizure of power by a tyrant claiming to represent a mystical popular will. The fact that the European mind can put its foundational principles through such radical mutations should make us very wary about relying on its political vocabulary. ''Sovereignty'' as a means of harmonizing Native survival with the dominant society means, first of all, the right of tribes to self-preservation - cultural, linguistic, religious, territorial and political continuity. Native peoples have this right because they were here first and they haven't gone away, and none of the old European arguments for dispossession make any sense, even to Europeans. It's become inescapably clear that the denial of this right to the tribes has caused massive social misery and that the exercise of this right has become the path to healing and recovery. The task is to explain this right to the dominant society in a vocabulary free of irrelevant historical baggage and unintended meanings, and to show the whole country that it too will benefit. LINK BELOW- indiancountrytoday.com/content.cfm?id=1096413631
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Post by mdenney on Jan 31, 2007 19:23:02 GMT -5
Kauffman wins Washington state Senate primary SEATTLE - Claudia Kauffman is an American Indian woman who is making politicians across Washington state take notice. On Sept. 19, she captured the Democratic nomination for the state Senate seat in suburban Seattle's 47th District with a tough primary victory over opponent Ed Crawford, the former police chief of Kent. link below- indiancountrytoday.com/content.cfm?feature=yes&id=1096413789
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Post by mdenney on Jan 31, 2007 19:23:24 GMT -5
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Post by mdenney on Jan 31, 2007 22:17:24 GMT -5
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Post by mdenney on Jan 31, 2007 22:38:50 GMT -5
Cobell says lawsuit will proceed ''We have said from the beginning that we want a settlement, but have emphasized that it must be fair. ... It is not fair to pay claims pennies on the dollar link below- indiancountrytoday.com/content.cfm?id=1096413943
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Post by mdenney on Jan 31, 2007 22:39:05 GMT -5
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Post by mdenney on Jan 31, 2007 22:39:27 GMT -5
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Post by mdenney on Jan 31, 2007 22:58:55 GMT -5
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Post by mdenney on Feb 1, 2007 23:59:28 GMT -5
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Post by mdenney on Feb 2, 2007 0:09:07 GMT -5
Interior reopens comment period on trust reform rules Thursday, February 1, 2007 For the second time, the Bush administration has extended the public comment period on a major set of trust reform regulations. In a Federal Register notice published last week, the Bureau of Indian Affairs said it would take comments on the proposal until March 12. That gives Indian Country more than a month to weigh in on a broad set of rules affect probate, land title, land conveyances and other trust issues. "The BIA and Office of Secretary again are extending the comment period by 45 days to ensure that all interested parties, including tribes and individual Indians, have the opportunity to review the proposed rule and prepare their comments," the January 25 notice stated. The regulations can be easily accessed at www.doitrustregs.com, a web site set up for the Interior Department by a private contractor. But that wasn't the case when the 600-plus page proposal was first announced in December 2005. The National Congress of American Indians complained about the sheer size of the undertaking as well as its scope. The Bush administration subsequently dropped some controversial sections -- one affecting the land-into-trust process and another that would impose a fee structure on tribes and individual Indians for trust services. Amid efforts to settle the Cobell trust fund lawsuit, the administration then proposed a dramatic reshaping of its trust relationship with tribes and individual Indians. Over 10 years, the government would slowly cede control over the 54-million Indian estate and would no longer accept liability for alleged mismanagement. With those ideas effectively shelved for now, the Interior Department is still responsible for carrying out a wide range of duties. The proposed regulations are divided into seven major sections: probates, tribal probate codes, the BIA's Land Title and Records Office, land conveyances, estates, administrative appeals and probate hearing procedures. Within the land title section, Interior wants to charge a fee for maintaining accurate information about allotments. Exceptions can be granted if the service involves land consolidation, which seeks to reduce the number of individual owners for particular parcels of trust property. The other sections seek to implement the American Indian Probate Reform Act of 2004. The law, which amends the Indian Land Consolidation Act, establishes a uniform probate code for individual Indian allotments that were previously handled under state laws. The law also encourages tribes to adopt their own probate codes. The proposed regulations define how the Interior Department will review the codes. To submit comments, interested parties can follow some forms on the DOI site, or go to www.regulations.gov and use the identifier 1076-AE59. Comments can also be submitted via email, fax or mail. Michelle Singer, an aide at the BIA in Washington, D.C., is overseeing the effort link below- indianz.com/News/2007/000692.asp
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Post by mdenney on Feb 2, 2007 2:43:39 GMT -5
Santee chief encourages participation in census Posted: December 04, 2006 COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - Santee Tribe Chief Roosevelt Scott is sure there are more than 30,000 American Indians in South Carolina. Scott thinks many of the uncounted might think like he did 30 years ago, when he used to tell people he was white. ''I know some people would have given me a rough time if they knew I was an Indian. As a white man, I knew no one would say anything to me,'' said Scott, who with his blond hair and blue eyes looked the part too. more >> link below- www.indiancountry.com/index.cfm?key=2Santee chief encourages participation in census Email this page Print this page Posted: December 04, 2006 by: The Associated Press COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - Santee Tribe Chief Roosevelt Scott is sure there are more than 30,000 American Indians in South Carolina. Scott thinks many of the uncounted might think like he did 30 years ago, when he used to tell people he was white. link below- www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096414122
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Post by mdenney on Feb 2, 2007 3:01:29 GMT -5
Supreme Court rules for DOI in royalty collection case Tuesday, December 12, 2006 The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday unanimously upheld the Interior Department's efforts to collect royalties from oil and gas companies. In the 7-0 decision, the court said the Minerals Management Service is not time-barred in seeking back payments for drilling on federal land. The companies had claimed the government was restricted by a six-year statute of limitations. But the justices said the limitation only applies to court proceedings, not to administrative proceedings within DOI. The companies must pay hundreds of millions of dollars more as a result. Had the court accepted the oil companies' arguments, Justice Samuel A. Alito said it would have created "disharmony" in the federal government's trust responsibilities to tribes and individual Indians. Imposing the limitation would prevent Interior from "aggressively" carrying out its fiduciary duties, the opinion stated. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. did not participate in the ruling. He had heard the case when he was on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Get the Story: link below- www.indianz.com/News/2006/017325.aspwww.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/11/AR2006121100340.html
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Post by mdenney on Feb 2, 2007 3:29:39 GMT -5
Protesting At Sioux Reservation Published Date: 07-31-2006 10:51 PM CT There is turmoil brewing on the lower Sioux Reservation. Protesters are picketing outside the lower Sioux community's Jackpot Junction Casino. At issue accusations of civil rights violations by tribal leadership. News 12's Andrea Bullard has more on the situation. Members of the lower Sioux community and non members have been demonstrating across from Jackpot Junction since Friday. They say they'll stay here until their voice is heard. We want our voices to be heard and we want our civil rights back as members, that's what our main goal is. They want the current president Sheldon Wolfchild to step down because they feel their civil rights have been taken away by the ruling majority. We've got these three that are the majority of our tribal council and basically they have taken away our civil rights as members of lower Sioux. The majority of our community does not agree with the people at the picket sign. We've been dealing with change and its very hard for people to accept change. When your going along for many years and somebody else comes in and to bring everything up to date and work with the outside world more, it's hard for them to change. But the two dissenters on the council say it's more than simple change. They are rewriting all the rules we had in place before and are making them their own. But Wolfchild says he is following what he said he would do when he ran for office. There's really excellent things going on here, the disgruntled people here can't take change. Everything here is under control. Despite the president's assurances, these protesters say they worry about the future of their community and economy leaving these protesters picketing in the hot Minnesotan sun. In Redwood County, Andrea Bullard, News link below- www.keyc.tv/article/view/104515/video link - www.keyc.tv/viewer/viewerpage.php?Art_ID=104515
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