For module 3 the web resource I decided to look at was Carlisle Indian Industrial School. When I clicked on the line it actually took me to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia site actually list a lot of information about the school. I says that the school was the flagship Indian boarding school in the United States from 1879 through 1918. It was also known as part of the US army War College.

The school was founded in 1879 by Captain Richard henry Pratt. He ran the school which was the 1^st Native American school to be federally funded and off the reservation.

Carlisle became the model for 26 Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools in 15 states and territories, and hundreds of private boarding schools sponsored by religious denominations. It states that the school is now a land mark and can be visited.

Carlisle and similar schools have been controversial because many Native Americans say that these forced children to leave their families at young ages, and to give up their own cultures, languages, religion and even their names, doing psychological damage to generations. Since the 1970s, Native American nations have taken back control of the education of their children and started their own schools and colleges

I could go on and on from the website it has a ton of links and information about the school and everything connected to the schools. I would recommend this site to anyone wanting to learn any information about the school.

Work cited

Carlisle Indian Industrial School. (2017, June 29). Retrieved June 30, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlisle_Indian_Industrial_School

Module 5 Journal Blog-Challenges

The video that I watched is the Challenges Facing 21^st Century Indigenous Peoples and featured as the guest speaker, Wilma Mankiller. Wilma is the former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation and the first woman to serve as the Principal Chief of the Cherokee peoples. The source of the video is the Arizona State University Library (ASU) and the web source can be found at: lib.asu.edu/librarychannel. The perspective that I think the video is meant to convey is being seen in the eyes of the Cherokee people and that the Cherokee people have survived so much in their past that it will be of such importance that they have what tit will take to continue to survive and will successfully face what ever the future holds.

One of the most important messages that I had learned from watching the video is that when Mankiller stated “this sounds all too familiar- Take the land, discredit the leaders, ridicule the traditional healers and the medicine men, take the children and send them off to distant boarding schools, a very familiar story”. This video also addresses an important issue that is true especially today, it is important to remember that the roots of many contemporary social, economic, and political problems can be found in colonial policies and that these policies continue today across the globe. Mankiller then goes on to tell that her own family members were subjected to being taken at a very young age and sent off to these boarding schools.

I think that the purpose of making a Native American focused journal into a blog is that it uses a more well known forum that can be used for so many more things that just a course project. It has shown us that the journal blogs can be a very useful way of communicating and presenting information in a more flexible manner. The use of graphics and pictures gives the information presented a more appealing view of what we are discussing and gives a different avenue in which to present the information that we wish to share.

ASU Library

Academic Journal Blog M5

The video of Wilma Mankiller’s speech at Arizona State University titled Challenges Facing 21^st Century Indigenous People was inspiring. She concluded her speech with a series of statements about what it means to be an indigenous person in the 21^st century. One statement in particular seemed to summarize the purpose of this course for me.

“Being an indigenous person in the 21^st century means trusting our own thinking again, believing in ourselves, looking within our communities for solutions to problems, and not only articulating our own vision of the future, but having within our communities the skill sets and leadership ability to make those visions become a reality.”

In order for Native Americans to overcome the economic and social problems faced by many of their people, the first step is to once again trust your own thinking. Return to tribal culture, relearn the wisdom of being Indian and trust your thinking as you trust the thinking of your ancestors. Believe in yourself. Be proud to be Indian and be proud of your heritage. You are not superior to others, but also others are not superior to you. Don’t look for solutions to problems outside of your communities. The people who best understand these problems are the people living in your communities. Enlist their understanding and wisdom to collectively decide the best thing to do for your people. And finally, develop skills and leadership with your communities. You are the people most affected and you are the people who can make your visions become reality. This is surely a very powerful message for all Native Americans.

End of Module 3

                                                  American  Indian  Law  Forum
                                                           Delphi  Forums

American  Indian  communities  are  being  invaded  by  drugs,  gangs,  and  the  violence  that  comes  with  it.  Drug  traffickers  have  infiltrated  Indian  land  with  gangs  on  reservations  throughout  America.  The  reservations  are  remote  and  have  small  Tribal  Police  forces  that  must  patrol  large  areas.  The  Tribal  Police  just  don't  have  the  resources  to  stop  all  the  drugs  coming  through  the  reservation.  Drug  traffickers  can  move  their  drugs  through  reservation  land  usually  undetected.  The  traffickers  usually  recruit  young  Native  teens  to  help  with  this  process.  The  traffickers  will  search  for  Native  teens  from  fragmented  families,  abused,  depressed,  and  loners.  The  Drug  traffickers  will  then  offer  the  teens  the  gang  life  as  a  sense  of  family.  Something  the  teens  were  yearning  for  or  missing  in  their  lives.  Of  course  in  every  family  there  is  chores,  in  this  one  you  just  have  to  run  drugs  and  hurt  people.  Money  is  steadily  available  so  material  items  are  easy  to  come  by,  this  is  another  tool  Drug  traffickers  use  to  trap  their  victims  in  with.  Drug  traffickers  and  gang  runners  use  a  favorite  saying  which  is,  "Blood  in  Blood  out".  That  is  pretty  much  self-explanatory.

The  Senate  Indian  Affairs  Committee  has  been  notified  about  these  problems,  something  must  be  done.  "There  exists  in  Indian  Country  today  the  twin  scourge  of  drug  abuse  and  criminal  gang  activity,"  said  Carmen  Smith,  police  chief  for  the  Warm  Springs,  Ore.,  Tribal  Police  Department.  This  left  untreated  will  ruin  the  whole  fabric  of  the  Native  American  society.

Pine  Ridge  Indian  Reservation  in  South  Dakota,  39  gangs  have  led  to  thousands  of  gang-related  phone  calls.  What  doesn't  help  the  situation  is  that  funding  cuts  have  gotten  so  bad  in  the  police  department,  they had  to  fire  about  half  of  the  force  in  the  mid-1990's.  I  don't  understand  how  they  can  do  this  at  Pine  Ridge,  this  community  suffers  enough.

The  Navajo  Nation  spans  Arizona,  New  Mexico,  and  Utah,  this  reservation  equalls  27,000  miles.  In  this  area  225  active  gangs  roam  freely.

Lawmakers  are  working  on  legislation  that  would  improve  coordination  between  the  Justice  Department,  the  Bureau  of  Indian  Affairs  and  tribal  law  enforcement,  encourage  more  aggressive  action  by  federal  prosecutors  on  tribal  reservations  and  allow  tribal  courts  to  punish  offenders  to  up  to  three  years  in  prison.   Thomas, Ken  "Tribal leaders seek help with Indian gang activity"  2009  The Associated Press

Check  out  this  Documentary  about  gangs,  drugs,  hopelessness  and  the  resulting  social  problems  on  the  White  Earth  Reservation  called  the  "Seventh  Fire".  It's  streamable  on  Netflix  and  Amazon,  and  ITunes  to.   The Seventh Fire Drugs and Gangs on Native Reservations


                                                          

Academic Journal Blog M3 - Web Resource

The web resource I selected to describe from Module 3 is the Native American Authors link to an alphabetic listings by author’s name, resource (online or book) title, and tribal affiliation. A message is posted on the homepage stated that the IPL2 consortium of US colleges and universities is now closed permanently, but that the website, hosted by Drexel University, may continue to be used.

I was surprised by the amount of information available on this website. Anyone looking for information about Native American authors would be well served to bookmark this website for future reference. The IPL2 did a terrific job of compiling and organizing this data. However, at some point in the future, as this site is not updated, the data will become incomplete. I hope that some other organization sees the value in this resource, and assumes responsibility for maintaining and providing this information as an online resource.

I decided to test the value of the resource by searching for my voice, Wilma Mankiller. I easily found four online resources about her, and a book reference to “A Chief and Her People” written by her. I know that I could have found these same, and probably thousands more resources, with a simple Google (or some other browser) search, but the ease and simplicity of using this resource should make it very attractive to researchers.

One of the online resources was a speech titled “Rebuilding the Cherokee Nation” given by Mankiller in 1993 at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. I read through her speech and found very interesting that when she became Chief she did not focus on the daunting problems facing the Cherokee, but instead on the strengths of the Cherokee and making use of those strengths to tackle those daunting problems. The strengths she mentioned were: the Cherokee are a tenacious people; the Cherokee paid attention to culture, history and heritage; the Cherokee had great leadership in their communities; and the Cherokee had a great sense of interdependence. From her perspective, these strengths were the foundation for rebuilding the Cherokee Nation.

Module 3 - Indian Affairs.gov

Module 3 Journal Blog – Indian Affairs.gov  

For module 3 I have reviewed the web resource of IndianAffairs.gov, which is the site of the U.S. Department of the Interior/ Indian Affairs. This web source site was created by the Department of the Interior in Washington D.C. The web resource is a very extensive resource that will enable a great amount of research to be done on current as well as past legal topics. This specific page that is listed for module’s 3 online web sources is the frequently asked questions page. This may seem unimportant, but this page is actually an endless resource and starting point for many basic questions that I personally have and many others may also have. One example of a good basic question that I even wanted to the answer to was:

What is a federal Indian reservation?
In the United States there are three types of reserved federal lands:  military, public, and Indian.  A federal Indian reservation is an area of land reserved for a tribe or tribes under treaty or other agreement with the United States, executive order, or federal statute or administrative action as permanent tribal homelands, and where the federal government holds title to the land in trust on behalf of the tribe (bia.gov/faq)

What perspective do you think it is meant to convey? I think that the web source is trying to convey the perspectives of creating a site that offers the general public quick and easy access to many answers that are often asked but are tough to get a direct answer to. The web source also gives the person looking for information about Native American tribes within the United States the government’s own answers to frequently asked by the public. If a person needs to find an answer to a specific question such as: What are Indian treaty rights?, it should be of great help if one had the ‘government’ answer to that question rather than just an answer that was placed on some random website. This would be of special interest to someone who seeks a reliable resource that could be used for scholarly purposes.

One additional part to this web source is a very interesting and savable map of ‘Indian Lands of Federally Recognized Tribes of the United States’ and this map is available for download in a .pdf format. 

www.bia.gov/FAQs/index.htm