Posts Tagged ‘Native Americans’
How the Gulf of Mexico became the nation’s ‘toilet bowl’
When Nazia Dardar looks at the seemingly endless lake of water behind her stilted bayou home, the 76-year-old sees what once was a farm. Cows roamed there, she says, back when the lake was land.
“C’est le jour et la nuit,” she says in French, the most common language down here on the farthest and swampiest reaches of the Mississippi River delta. “It’s day and night.”
Perhaps nowhere is the protracted death of the Gulf Coast more apparent than in Pointe-Aux-Chenes, Louisiana, and other indigenous bayou communities where, decades before the BP oil disaster, the marsh started disintegrating and environmental problems washed in from as far away as North Dakota and New York.
The Gulf of Mexico became, in effect, the United States’ toilet bowl — known for its seasonal “dead zones,” high erosion rates, dirty industry, ingrained poverty and, now, for the biggest oil disaster in the history of the country. Compare that legacy on the Gulf Coast with the East Coast, with its wealth, and the West, with its more-sterling record of environmental stewardship…
These wetlands, a 20-minute boat ride from the stilted homes of Pointe-Aux-Chenes, provide nearly all the needs of people here. Shrimp, crab, fish and oysters spawn and hide in the protective grasses. Those creatures are the basis for the local economy.
They’re also what everyone eats…
Since 1932, more than 1,875 square miles of Louisiana have shriveled and died, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That’s enough land to nearly cover Delaware…
The Corp of Engineers – BTW – can take credit for the taxpayer-funded portion of the destruction.
Native Americans hope for the best from healthcare reform
Republican Health Care Plan
The meeting last month was a watershed: the leaders of 564 American Indian tribes were invited to Washington to talk with cabinet members and President Obama, who called it “the largest and most widely attended gathering of tribal leaders in our history.”
Topping the list of their needs was better health care.
“Native Americans die of illnesses like tuberculosis, alcoholism, diabetes, pneumonia and influenza at far higher rates,” Mr. Obama said. “We’re going to have to do more to address disparities in health care delivery.”
The health care overhaul now being debated in Congress appears poised to bring the most significant improvements to the Indian health system in decades. After months of negotiations, provisions under consideration could, over time, direct streams of money to the Indian health care system and give Indians more treatment options.
Some proposals, like exempting Indians from penalties for not obtaining insurance, may meet resistance from lawmakers opposed to expanding benefits for Indians, many of whom receive free medical care.
But advocates say the changes recognize Indians’ unique status and could ease what Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, calls “full-scale health care rationing going on on Indian reservations.”
“We’ve got the ‘first Americans’ living in third world conditions,” Mr. Dorgan said.
RTFA. Decent health care within reach is unbelievably difficult on most tribal reservations.
Mediocre care has been the rule ever since that much-beloved conservative Ronald Reagan decided to gut the budget for Public Health. I witnessed our best-known compassionate conservative in action when I lived within the medical community in the Navajo Nation.
He wanted to do away with Indian Health Service hospitals altogether. Let ‘em go to town if they’re sick. Even if the nearest Anglo town was 200 miles away.
First Americans arrived as two separate migrations
The first people to arrive in America traveled as at least two separate groups to arrive in their new home at about the same time, according to new genetic evidence published online in Current Biology.
After the Last Glacial Maximum some 15,000 to 17,000 years ago, one group entered North America from Beringia following the ice-free Pacific coastline, while another traversed an open land corridor between two ice sheets to arrive directly into the region east of the Rocky Mountains. (Beringia is the landmass that connected northeast Siberia to Alaska during the last ice age.) Those first Americans later gave rise to almost all modern Native American groups of North, Central, and South America, with the important exceptions of the Na-Dene and the Eskimos-Aleuts of northern North America…
Such a dual origin for Paleo-Indians has major implications for all disciplines involved in Native American studies, said Antonio Torroni. For instance, it implies that there is no compelling reason to presume that a single language family was carried along with the first migrants.
When Columbus reached the Americas in 1492, Native American occupation stretched from the Bering Strait to Tierra del Fuego, Torroni explained. Those native populations encompassed extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, which has fueled extensive debate among experts over their interrelationships and origins…
The evidence that separate groups of people with distinctive genetic roots entered the Americas independently at the same time strongly implies linguistic and cultural differences between them. “The origin of the first Americans is very controversial to archaeologists and even more so to linguists,” said study corresponding author Professor Antonio Torroni, heading the University of Pavia group. “Our genetic study reveals a scenario in which more than one language family could have arrived in the Americas with the earliest Paleo-Indians.”
I have to wonder how some anthropology arguments can continue in the face of DNA information.
