INDIANS ASK APPEALS COURT FOR FOR JUSTICE

From: www.indiantrust.com

WASHINGTON, May 11 -- A federal appeals court was told today that it should offer 500,000 Native Americans some form of "rough justice" as a result of the federal government's acknowledged mismanagement of their trust accounts.

Attorney Dennis M. Gingold, who represents the Indians in a 13-year-old class action lawsuit, said justice for the Native American trust account beneficiaries cannot be complete because so many records of what happened to their trust lands and funds are missing.

That means some form of "rough justice" is required, Gingold said, adding that any resolution of the case must be fair.

"If not, we'll all be here another 13 years," Gingold told a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Government lawyers said they want the case declared at an end and the Indians given nothing at all. Alisa Klein, an appellate lawyer with the Justice Department's Civil Division, argued that the Indians are due nothing.

Plaintiffs opposed an llth-hour effort by the Osage Tribe to intervene in the case and take control of its members' individual trust accounts. Plaintiffs have fully represented the interests of individual Osage tribal members from the outset of the litigation in 1996.

Individual Osage tribal members are clearly part of the lawsuit, because their trust accounts were always classified as the property of individuals and not the tribe, Gingold told the court.

After the hour-long hearing, Lead Plaintiff Elousie Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Nation from Browning, Mont., said that the government continued to mislead the appeals court about how the trust accounts have been managed. The accounts have never been audited, she noted, pointing out that the lower court had held an accounting remains "impossible." "I am very optimistic," she told reporters. "The court asked very good questions."

As for the idea of "rough justice," she said: "We all understand what's going to happen." She said any sum that is finally approved by the court will be distributed after additional hearings and under court supervision.

The three-judge panel gave no indication when it would rule.

The Indian Trust was established by Congress in 1887. It included millions of acres of valuable lands in the West owned by individual Indians, whom lawmakers believed could not manage those lands. That job was given to the Interior Department, which has repeatedly acknowledged in the lawsuit that it mismanaged the trust accounts.

For additional information:
Bill McAllister (media calls only)
703-385-6996

Lakota Buffalo Caretakers Launch Retail Meat Sales

This weekend, the Lakota Buffalo Caretakers Cooperative launched retail sales of packaged grass-fed buffalo meat raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The Lakota Buffalo Caretakers Cooperative (LBCC) is a 100% Native American owned and operated cooperative association on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Its membership is made up of small family buffalo caretakers who respect the buffalo and the land.

Buffalo raised by members:

• Live on open ranges, never in feedlots
• Eat wild grasses their entire lives
• Are Free from antibiotics and hormones
• Respectfully harvested in the field

Members of the LBCC are committed to the restoration of the northern plains ecology, self-sufficiency and strengthening the sovereignty and self-determination of the Oglala Lakota Nation and all indigenous peoples. To the best of our knowledge, the LBCC is the only Native American run cooperative of small family buffalo caretakers in the United States.

Village Earth helped to establish the LBCC starting in 2007. The LBCC was officially incorporated in South Dakota August of 2008. The LBCC has partnered with the Fort Collins based Allied Natural Meats, LLC. which will function as its fair-trade distribution partner. The LBCC currently has the capability to ship wholesale orders throughout the country. However, at this time, the LBCC and Allied Natural Meats, LLC are only set up to do online retail sales in the Fort Collins, Colorado area but hope to be selling national via mail order soon. For more information please visit the LBCC website at http://www.lakotabuffalocaretakers.org.

2009 Pine Ridge Study Tour

Village Earth and its community partners on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota are putting together a study tour June 20th-27th, 2009.

If you are interested in participating please contact david@villageearth.org.

Schedule subject to change. Please keep visiting this post for updated information.

Below are some highlights of some of the things to expect.

Visit Village Earth's Community Partners and Their Projects Across the Reservation.




Lend a Hand In Community-Based Projects
Above Photo taken at the 2005 Sustainable Nations Training on Pine Ridge



Become a Part of Land Recovery and Bison Restoration on Pine Ridge

Mapping for Change on Pine Ridge

Land issues on Native American Reservations are extremely complex and masked by layers and layers of bureaucracy. The old axiom, knowledge is power is the name of the game. But the game has changed with the advent of computerized mapping such as GIS (Geographic Information Systems) which has created a common platform for the exchange, creation, analysis, and presentation of geographic information. Where in the past, geographic information was stored deep in filing cabinets, hard to comprehend, and controlled by a few gatekeepers, GIS has allowed us to democratize this information, making it more accessible and more understandable. This approach is not new. Decolonization theorist Frantz Fanon recognized the importance of mapping in his classic 1961 work, “The Wretched of the Earth”, when he said “The colonial world is a world divided into compartments Yet, if we examine closely this system of compartments, we will at least be able to reveal the lines of force it implies. This approach to the colonial world, its ordering and its geographical layout will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be organized.” Edward Said mirrored these comments when he said: “the "slow and often bitterly disputed recovery of geographical territory which is at the heart of decolonization is preceded--as empire had been--by the charting of cultural territory."

Village Earth's work with the Oglala Lakota on Pine Ridge is a good illustration in how mapping can be powerful tool for decolonization, but to understand how, requires a look back at the history of land issues for Native Americans in general and on Pine Ridge specifically.

Between the period of 1492 to 1887 Native Americans were left with a territory that consisted of only 150 million acres of land. Furthermore, the practice of communally managed lands by some tribes was viewed by the Federal Government as a non-productive and irrational use of resources. To address these interests, in 1887 the U.S. Congress passed General Allotment Act (GAA) also known as the Dawes Severalty Act. The purpose of the act was to liquidate Indian land holdings by dividing the land up into 40 to160-acre allotments to heads of households. After all the allotments were issued remaining lands in the West, which totaled over 60,000,000 acres, was opened up to homesteaders. Along with the liquidating nearly 2/3rds of all “surplus” Indian lands, The GAA also created several contradictions for the use and inheritance of the remaining lands that would have deep implications for virtually all aspects of life for Native Americans. It broke apart communally managed lands into individually owned parcels destroyed the ability of many communities to be self sufficient on already limited and marginal lands.
It disrupted traditional residency patterns, forcing people to live on allotments sometimes far from their relatives, eroding traditional kinship practices across many reservations.

Forced Fee Patenting, introduced with the 1906 Burke Act, amended the GAA to give the secretary of the interior the power to issue Indian Allottees determined to be “competent,” fee patents making their lands subject to taxation and sale. According to the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, nearly 27,000,000 acres of land was lost as a result. Although the practice of issuing forced fee patents and forced leasing ended in 1934 with the passing of the Wheeler-Howard Act, the effects are still felt today. In that many families are landless because an ancestor was issued a fee patent and lost their land through tax forfeit or bank foreclosure.
Indian Allottees determined to be “incompetent, ” under the Burke Act, were not allowed to live on or utilize their allotment, instead it was leased out by the Federal Government to oil, timber, mineral, and grazing interests.
Under the GAA the land alloted to Individual Indians is not really owned by them, rather it is held in Trust by the Federal Government. This means the land can be used by the Allottee but not sold. This situation has severely limited the ability of Indian landowners to develop assets on their lands including housing, business, and other infrastructure because they are not able to use it as a guarantee for loans.

The GAA also established a system for how lands would be inherited from a landowner to his children. Since the practice of creating a Last Will and Testament before death was not common and in some cases was outright offensive to the traditional inheritance practices of some Native American cultures, these lands passed from one generation to the next without clear divisions of who owned what. After several generations lands have become so fractionated that you might have as many as several hundred landowners on one piece land. This has created a severe obstacle today for individuals and families wanting to utilize their lands as they need to get permission from at least 50% of the land owners on decisions related to the land.

With financial support from the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, Village Earth is developing Strategic Land Planning Map Books, a sort of “land recovery atlas” of the Pine Ridge Reservation, to provide the information necessary and clarify the steps for Native American Land owners to identify, consolidate, and utilize their lands. It contains easy to understand instructions and diagrams on how landowners can use the descriptions from their “interest reports” (a sort of Tribal land title created by the Federal Government) to locate maps of their lands, instructions and procedures for consolidating lands, removing lands from the Federal leasing program, partitioning lands, and creating wills. It also contains maps of the current leasing patterns as well as maps of the traditional communities that were broken apart by the Dawes Act and federal housing programs. In conjunction with a series of strategic land-planning workshops, one-to-one consultation, and training a corps of local land-planning consultants in each district, we hope to help reverse some of the damages created by 120 years of exploitative land policies on the Pine Ridge Reservation. For more information about this project contact David Bartecchi david@villageearth.org.

More Buffalo Delivered to Pine Ridge

This weekend, Village Earth delivered 7 more buffalo to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. These buffalo were donated by the Danylchuck Buffalo Ranch in Rye, Colorado . This is the 5th year that the Danylchuck's have donated buffalo to Lakota buffalo ranchers on Pine Ridge. We loaded the buffalo as soon as the sun rose Saturday morning and were quickly on the road, headed north to South Dakota. All the animals received the necessary vaccinations and certifications for interstate travel.

The Adopt-A-Buffalo program is part of Village Earth's larger initiative to support Lakota families to recover their lands from the BIA leasing program and utilize them on their own. Currently, over 60% of the Pine Ridge Reservation is being leased out, oftentimes to non-tribal members for a fraction of their value while Lakota families struggle to find regular employment.

Naturally, this situation has had a dramatic impact on the overall economy on Pine Ridge. According to the USDA 2002 Census of Agriculture for American Indian Reservations of Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, in 2002 there was nearly 33 million dollars in receipts from agricultural production on Pine Ridge, yet less than 1/3rd of that income went to members of the tribe. According to GIS data published by the BIA, 20 people control more than 46% of the land-base on Pine Ridge.

Village Earth supports the broader land-reform movement across Indian Country which seeks to enhance the sovereignty of Native American's by strengthening their control over their natural resources.

$455 Million, Adding Insult to Injury

Federal District judge Robertson recently ruled that the U.S. Government owes Native Americans $455 million dollars as "proper repair" for the estimated $47 billion that the Government never paid individual Indians for income generated from over 120 years of managing oil, gas, grazing, timber, and mining leases on their lands. This ruling came after nearly 16 years of litigation in the largest ever class action lawsuit against the federal government - representing some 500,000 individual Indians whose lands were being leased out by the federal government. On Tuesday Eloise Cobell, the lead plaintiff, appeared on Democracy Now! to announce her intent to appeal this decision. In the words of Mrs. Cobell:

"The opinion is both profoundly disappointing and difficult to understand. It disregards unchallenged evidence of record, law of the case, law of the DC Circuit since 1895, and settled law as set forth by the United States Supreme Court.

Among other things, duties and responsibilities of the US government as Trustee for the Individual Indian Trust are the same as those that apply to private trustees, unless Congress expressly has enacted legislation to the contrary. No such legislation has been enacted.

Accordingly, the unwillingness of the district court to apply trust law is puzzling. So is its unwillingness to hold the government accountable for its egregious breaches of trust. The district court now says that holding the government accountable would be unfair to the government. The complete lack of concern for fairness to victims of 120 years of abuse is utterly incomprehensible to Native People."

Village Earth is working at "ground-zero" on this issue. While we support Cobell's efforts to seek justice from the Federal Government and force them to repair this horribly flawed system, we are working to help people reclaim and consolidate their lands from the Federal leasing system giving them an opportunity to bennefit directly from them on their own.

Pepper Creek Gardening Project

(Above: Pete rakes cut grass on his land for feed for goats and other animals he's raising)

In the heart of Pine Ridge's Wounded Knee District, a few miles up a dirt road west of Manderson lies Pepper Creek and the location of Pete Stand's growing farm project. According to Pete, he's just trying to make a better life for his kids and provide fresh vegetables to the local community. With a tractor recently purchased with a small grant from Village Earth, Pete is reclaiming old 1800's farm implements used by his grandfather during a time before the relocation programs of the post WWII era and the HUD cluster housing projects of the 60's and 70's when families across the reservation lived on their allotted lands and grew much of their own food. Along with working seasonally for area ranchers, Pete is carving out his own niche by growing vegetables, raising goats, horses, and chickens and with the help of area extension agent Sean Burke, Pete plans to expand into raising pigs and ducks.


(Above: Pete adjusting the 1800's era rake his grandfather used to use)

Pete is part of a growing movement of people on the Pine Ridge Reservation tired of living in the deteriorating housing projects with few options for work. A situation is compounded by the growing epidemic of diabetes on the reservation caused, in part, by the lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables. It's a terrible irony that the poorest communities in America often pay the most for food and that highly processed foods tend to be the cheapest source of raw calories. This certainly holds true for the Pine Ridge Reservation but people like Pete Stands and others across the reservation are working to create a more equitable and localized food-web.

Village Earth first learned about Pete's project from Calvin White Butterfly who is working to mobilize Tiyospayes (traditional sub-communities comprised of extended families) within the Wounded Knee District to utlize their lands to develop projects that enhance local self-reliance and cultural self-determination. We would like to thank Honor the Earth and the support of our donors for making these projects possible.

For more information contact: david@villageearth.org