Free Republic

Suzy Kies, the co-chair of the Indigenous peoples' commission of the Liberal Party, has resigned from the position after her claim to Indigenous ancestry was called into question. Radio-Canada reported on Wednesday that it could not confirm Kies's claims to Indigenous ancestry. Kies told Radio-Canada in an interview that her father is of European descent and her mother is of Indigenous descent. "My mother's family is from several communities," she told Radio-Canada in an interview in French. "On my grandfather's side, it's the Maliseet, from St. Mary's, New Brunswick, there are also the Laporte who are Innu. And my grandmother...

It seems like a long time ago. But only six months ago, pundits had convinced themselves that the great morality tale of our time was playing out in an obscure part of British Columbia. Following on an internal political fight within the Wet’suwet’en First Nation over a local pipeline project, one columnist wrote that “the Indigenous people of Earth have become the conscience of humanity. In this dire season, it is time to listen to them.”

Where to begin? We met with staff members from seven DC Senate offices on Monday. We had come to talk about the Indian Child Welfare Act and how it infringes on the right of children and parents. But sitting next to this young woman, who comes from the same reservation as my husband… I realized there is so, so much more we all need to talk about. She told how she was abused and used sexually as a child. She said she was first given to a man at the age of ten. Her sisters were also given to men....

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.), speaking on “MSNBC Live” on Jan. 16 said that “some of the southern areas have cultures that we have to overcome” when it comes to gun control. Rangel was asked by anchor Thomas Roberts whether new gun control measures passed in New York State should serve as models for other states: “If you’re proud of what New York has done, obviously there is not going to be any perfect policy or perfect law that everybody is going to agree on from both sides saying that this is key perfection but do you think that New York,...

Here’s a Comprehensive List of Tax Hikes in Obamacare...[SNIP]...Exemptions for religious objectors, UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS [poster's emphasis], prisoners, those earning less than the poverty line, members of Indian tribes, and hardship cases (determined by HHS)

The Current INS Officially Recognizes A Delineation Between Natural-Born and Native-Born. I was just made privy to a very important piece of research I had not previously been aware of. It comes by way of a comment forwarded to me by the author of the h2ooflife blog:“I had presumed that the idiom “natural born citizen” appeared nowhere in U.S. Law other than A2S1C5, but I found it in administrative law and it is contrasted with native and naturalized citizenship. I’ve never seen any mention of this fact before and wonder how many are aware of it in the ineligibility camp....

Incredible Video Of A Tribe Meeting White People For The First Time Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry Jun. 24, 2011, 6:37 AM This 15 minute video is from 1976 and shows a tribe in Papua New Guinea encountering white people for the first time. The reactions going from fear to wonder to curiosity to joy are incredible to behold. Watch:(Click to the site to view the video)(snip)

I have two liberal friends who love Amerindian peoples enough to go to sweat lodge retreats and medicine rituals. They passionately argue on behalf of Native Americans, and are dead set against Western culture. Naturally they are liberals --- and no, they aren't willing to give their homes back to the nearest Native American tribe to make up for our past sins. My friends are "settlers" who live in denial of their own family history. Their self-righteous cant on behalf of Siberian settlers in America -- also known as "Native" Americans -- is strictly limited to loud talk. It's slightly...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski is on the cusp of vindication after waging a high stakes - and long shot - write-in campaign to keep her job. Initial returns show write-in ballots holding a 13,439-vote edge over GOP nominee Joe Miller, and though it's not clear how many of those are for her or will be counted as valid, she's confident enough in her winning to tell supporters that they'd "made history." The write-in count starts Wednesday in Juneau.

Five-to-40-year-olds and Canada's aboriginal communities should be the first to get vaccinated against human swine flu, experts say as Canadian officials decide who gets priority for the flu shots. Under Canada's official pandemic plan, the entire population would ultimately be immunized against the H1N1 swine flu. But the vaccine will become available in batches, meaning the entire population can't be vaccinated at once. It might take four or five months to get all the vaccine we're going to get, during which time a second wave of swine flu may well be underway. The Public Health Agency of Canada is working...

A desperate struggle for survival — and not the white man and his horse — likely forced First Nations people on the Canadian Plains to band together in complex communities at least 1,700 years before what is currently accepted. And the way they came together to ward off threats from southern bands from the Dakotas and Minnesota may have resembled a very early form of democracy. University of Calgary archaeologist Dr. Dale Walde has proposed the controversial theory in the prestigious World Archaeology journal, following more than five years of research in the field in Alberta and Saskatchewan. If accepted,...

We've deluded ourselves into believing in the myth of the noble and peaceful primitive Nicholas Wade's Before The Dawn is one of those books full of eye-catching details. For example, did you know the Inuit have the largest brains of any modern humans? Something to do with the cold climate. Presumably, if this global warming hooey ever takes off, their brains will be shrinking with the ice caps. But the passage that really stopped me short was this: "Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of...

MARINE CORPS AIR GROUND COMBAT CENTER TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. (June 9, 2006) -- When the Persian Gulf War ended, nearly 110,000 Iraqi soldiers who were captured or surrendered were taken to camps in Saudi Arabia. Most were sent back to their country after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein issued amnesty to deserters. However, 13,000 of the soldiers refused to go home, fearing persecution by the regime. An estimated 1,000 of those Iraqi soldiers captured by U.S. forces during the 1991 Persian Gulf War were resettled in cities across the United States. Many of the former soldiers provided valuable services to U.S....

Week of March 4, 2006; Vol. 169, No. 9 , p. 133 Smoldered-Earth Policy: Created by ancient Amazonian natives, fertile, dark soils retain abundant carbon Ben Harder Shortly after the U.S. Civil War, a research expedition encountered a group of Confederate expatriates living in Brazil. The refugees had quickly taken to growing sugarcane on plots of earth that were darker and more fertile than the surrounding soil, Cornell University's Charles Hartt noted in the 1870s. The same dark earth, terra preta in Portuguese, is now attracting renewed scientific attention for its high productivity, mysterious past, and capacity to store carbon....

HADITHA DAM, Iraq (Sept. 19, 2005) -- The Marines from Jackson, Miss. lived within minutes of each other, attending rival schools and going to some of the same hangouts, but it took a deployment to Iraq to bring them together. Working in the motor transportation section of 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine regiment, which operates out of the Haditha Dam, is like a homecoming for those who hail from the same city. And the tightly-knit group plays an integral role in Operation Iraqi Freedom. “I feel we are the backbone of the entire unit,” said Lance Cpl. Kelvin O. Luse, a...

On Point: In search of natives April 14, 2005 In search of natives Could Ward Churchill solve his problems - or at least one of them - for an outlay of only $99.95? That's how much it costs for a mail-in DNA kit allowing experts at the National Geographic Society and IBM's Watson Research Labs to run tests that, according to the project's Web site (www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic), will let you "discover your own deep ancestry."

U.S. blocking Arctic report WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is trying to bury an international report that contains recommendations on the impact of global warming on the people of the Arctic, an Arctic leader told a Senate panel yesterday. State Department officials are blocking the release of one of two reports that were to be presented to government ministers from eight Arctic nations at a meeting on Nov. 9 in Reykjavik, Iceland, Sheila Watt-Cloutier of northern Quebec in Canada told the Senate Commerce Committee. She is chairwoman of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, representing native people. ... The science report will...

Page Updated: Monday, April 12, 2004 1:28 PM PDT Archaeologist talks about Oregon's early natives Dr. Dennis Jenkins believes the entire Sumner Lake Basin was once filled with water up to state Highway 31. Contributed Photo By Daniel Schreiber, Staff Writer Were humans present 12,000 years ago in the Great Basin region of Oregon when buffalo, non-Spanish horses and even camels roamed the landscape? This, the central question of University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins' series of digs, is what researchers have been trying to determine since the 1930s. In 1938, Luther Cressman, the first to explore the region, discovered...

REASON * May 2000 Earth Day, Then and Now The planet's future has never looked better. Here's why. By Ronald Bailey Thirty Years ago, 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Fifth Avenue in New York City was closed to automobiles as 100,000 people joined in concerts, lectures, and street theater. More than 2,000 colleges and universities across America paused their anti-war protests to rally instead against pollution and population growth. Even Congress recessed, acknowledging that the environment was now on a political par with motherhood. Since that first Earth Day, the celebrations...

WASHINGTON -- Feeling like the day is dragging? Blame global warming.Increased man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a global warming gas, is slowing the Earth's rotation, according to a new study by Belgian scientists published Tuesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.It's not much of a slowdown -- about 1.7 microsecond or 1.7 millionth of one second a year, according to co-author Michel Crucifix, a climate researcher at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. The slowdown occurs because extra carbon dioxide expands the mass of the Earth's atmosphere from the Earth's surface. The change slows the Earth's rotation for the ...