MANATAKA ORGANIZATIONAL MESSAGES

INSPIRATION...

A Lesson in Life

Everything happens for a reason. Nothing happens by chance or by means of good or bad luck. Illness, injury, love, lost moments of true greatness and sheer stupidity all occur to test the limits of your soul. Without these small tests, if they be events, illnesses or relationships, life would be like a smoothly paved, straight, flat road to nowhere. 

If someone hurts you, betrays you , or breaks you heart, forgive them. For they have helped you learn about trust and the importance of being cautious to who you open your heart to.

If someone loves you, love them back unconditionally, not only because they love you, but because they are teaching you to love and opening your heart and eyes to things you would have never seen or felt without them.

Make every day count. Appreciate every moment and take from it everything that you possibly can, for you may never be able to experience it again.

Talk to people you have never talked to before, and actually listen. Hold your head up because you have every right to. Tell yourself you are a great individual and believe in yourself, for if you don't believe in yourself, no one else will believe in you either.

You can make of your life anything you wish. Create your own life and then go out and live it.

~Submitted by Romaine Garcia

LETTER TO THE EDITOR...

Lost Cherokee Found Out

OSIYO,

My Name is Doyle Turner, I am a member of the Oversight Committee of the Lost Cherokee tribe of Arkansas and Missouri. On behalf of the honest membership of the Lost Cherokee Tribe and all other Cherokees that have been dishonored by the actions of a few self appointed, please accept our apology.  

As I read your October 2005, Volume VII, Issue 10 Newsletter regarding 'When is an Indian not an Indian,' I felt your distress over the condemnable and possible criminal activities of the self appointed headmen and their council. 

Their actions and behavior have hurt more individuals than you can envision. But, 92% of the membership are attempting to eliminate this thorn in our side via a lawsuit ('Injunction') filed in Van Buren Co., Clinton Arkansas. 

Please read the attached letter to the editor and in all fairness publish it in your next Newsletter. 

I am certain this investigation into the federal Office of Indian Education, grants program, is the result of parallel investigations.        

From June 2004, Governmental officials, from the Van Buren County District Attorney to State government were aware of legal issues within the leadership of the Lost Cherokee and this situation with the federal Office of Indian Education and they did NOTHING.

Members of the Lost Cherokee Tribe formed the Oversight Committee in 2004 to investigate questionable activities by the current self appointed headmen and their council. The Oversight Committee filed a lawsuit in Van Buren Co., Court in September of 2004 to force an ‘injunction’ to temporarily halt their submission to the BIA for federal recognition only 728 names out of a total membership of over 10,000 individuals.

The Oversight Committee was placed under a Court ‘gag order’ in February 2005 to allow the self appointed headmen to conduct business as usual.  We have been legally denied our civic responsibility in reporting their very ‘questionable’ conduct. 

The students and schools are innocent and should not be held responsible for the misleading actions of a few self appointed headmen and their council. State and Federal officials must step forward and it is incumbent upon them to insure those responsible for fraudulently misleading school officials and students will be charged.

Doyle L. Turner, Tribal Member and Official Spokesperson for the Oversight Committee.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR...

Manataka Wedding Thank You

We want to thank you for the blessing of our wedding ceremony during the Fall Gathering at Manataka.  The weekend meant so much to us and everyone at Manataka will remain forever in our hearts.  Not only did I gain a husband and Kenneth gained a new wife, but we now have a huge Manataka family.  We thank Bear and all the Elders for allowing us the privilege of being with you during this special time.

I can honestly say that coming to Manataka has completely changed our lives and we will come every year - we will make the trip an on-going tradition in our family.    I found out who I truly am.  I always knew I would find my true family one day -- and I have found that among all of you this weekend.  

Thank all of you for the wonderful weekend.  Thank you Creator for bringing us together as man and wife.  Thank you Mother Earth for your bounty and all that we see.  

We are looking forward to seeing everyone again!

~Ken and Shannon Riehle

LETTER TO THE EDITOR...

Every one should respect others beliefs

Regarding the internet attacks against Manataka... Sounds to me that some one is hiding behind a skirt. People that don't know the truth can only talk trash.  I'm not a member of Manataka, but if I were going to talk trash, I would have the back bone to let you know who I am, not be spineless like a worm. I met a some of your members at the Bell powwow.  They treated me with respect and invited me to come to your gathering.  Every one should respect others beliefs, unless their beliefs disrespect others beliefs.  That is our way.  ~Doug Gonser

LETTER TO THE EDITOR...

I watch the walk, and then judge the talk...

I was deeply saddened to read of the smear campaign being waged against the MAIC by these nameless cowards.  They never give their names, do they?  I've seen this happen so many times in the Native American community - spiritual leaders being smeared, attacks against political people - it sickens me.  And it almost always seems to come from someone named "Anonymous."  My father always used to say that if you wouldn't sign your name to your opinion, you should keep your opinion to yourself.  Anonymous attacks are the work of those without the courage to speak their minds openly in the Council Circle.  One cannot help but wonder why they will not stand up and speak in front of everyone.

I've been on the Red Road for more than 20 years now, and have had the great honor and privilege of sitting with some amazingly wise elders.  As they approach extreme old age, they all seem to have the
same thing to say:  Love one another.  Be good to one another.  Put aside jealousy and hatred.  Help one another.  I'm in the habit of listening carefully to people who are wiser than I am and generous enough to spend
their time trying to teach me what I don't know.  I do my best to honor them and their teachings.

So much hatred and divisiveness is becoming entrenched in government and bureaucracy, people hiding behind their uniforms and offices while promoting agendas of discord and disharmony.  Fear brings out the worst in people, and greed is just so ugly.  I applaud your stance of integrity in the face of this outrageous behavior; please let us know if there is anything we can do to support your efforts, letter-writing, whatever.

I for one have heard enough of this nonsense.  I watch the walk, and then judge the talk.  The members and leadership of Manataka are good, honorable people, unlike your attackers.  Your work in the world declares your good intentions.  Don't waste any more time on them - their hatred consumes them in the shadows.  Let them stay there.  Perhaps they will be inspired by you to come out into the light and live in harmony with the rest of us.

Blessings and love to you, and to the work you do for all of us.

Christina Maris

Eagle Sees Her / Quanah'che Mawokee
The Feathered Serpent Lodge
Albuquerque, New Mexico

FUNIHAHAS...

Indian Humor - New Mexico Style

A New Mexico State Trooper pulled over a van on I-25 about ten miles north of "The Pit". When the trooper asked the driver why he was speeding the driver answered that he was a juggler and he was on his way to Sandia Casino to do a show that night and didn't want to be late. 

The trooper told the driver he was fascinated by the juggling, and if the driver would do a little juggling for him, he wouldn't give him a ticket. The driver told the trooper that he had sent all of his equipment on ahead and that he didn't have anything to juggle. 

The trooper told him that he had some flares in the trunk of his squad car and asked if he could juggle them. The juggler stated that he could, so the trooper got three flares, lit them and handed them to the juggler. 

While the man was doing his juggling act, an old pickup with expired plates pulled up behind the squad car. An Indian who was obviously intoxicated, staggered out and watched the performance briefly. He shook his
head, went over to the squad car, opened the door and got in. The trooper observed the man doing this and went over to his squad car opened the back door and asked the drunk what he thought he was doing?! 

The drunk replied..."Sha-Bro...might as well take me to jail...There's no way in hell I can pass THAT test!!"

IN THE NEWS...  

Chris Eyre to Direct 'Indian Country: Native Americans in the 20th Century'

LOS ANGELES -- Chris Eyre will direct "Indian Country: Native Americans in the 20th Century," a four-part series to air on PBS television stations nationwide. The "Indian Country" series is the follow-up to the acclaimed 1995 miniseries "500 Nations." The new series will chronicle the history of Native American nations over the past 114 years, from the 1890 massacre of 300 Lakota at Wounded Knee to the present.

Celebrated Native American director Chris Eyre is an enrolled member of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. Eyre's film "Smoke Signals" was the first feature film directed by a Native American to receive a national theatrical release and it won the Audience Award and the Filmmaker's Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival. His other films include 2002's "Skins," starring Graham Greene and Eric Schweig; the TV movies "Skinwalkers" (2002), "Edge of America" (2003) and "A Thief of Time" (2004); and 2005's "A Thousand Roads," a forty-minute widescreen film shown exclusively at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian.

The series will show how Native American populations have grown eight-fold since Wounded Knee, how they are in
the process of reviving their cultural traditions, preserving their languages, prospering in new enterprises and even occasionally forcing the U.S. government to uphold its treaties.

The series, a tribute to the strength and persistence of the Native American nations, is aimed for national broadcast on public television, and for subsequent DVD and video distribution. A companion book and soundtrack CD are also planned, as are extensive educational materials and teaching guides to support and accompany
non-theatrical distribution.

Source - Katahdin Foundation
~Submitted by Helen RedWing

FUNNY BONES...

In Washington State, a little north of Seattle, is a river called the Stillaguamish, but it wasn't always called that.   It was originally named "Aguamish" after a local Indian tribe.  

When Lewis & Clark finally made their way to the west coast they came to the Aguamish tribe and met the chief who told them what the name of the river was and gave them a tour of  the area.  

Years later Merriweather Lewis returned and met the Aguamish chief again and the subject finally came around to the river:  

"Chief, I've been told that, because of so many white men have arrived in the area, many of the rivers are being renamed because they couldn't pronounce the names. Tell me, what is the name of your river now, please," Lewis pleaded.  

"Oh," replied the chief. "It's Stillaguamish." 

Submitted by Sheri Burnett

Elder's Meditation

"The real meaning of life is your family, the love that you have, the respect, the traditional ways, carrying on with them."  ~Ethel Wilson, Cowichan

The family is the seed of the future. The family is the key to the transfer of cultural information. We should really take a look at how we are looking at our families. Are we treating each family member with respect? Are we passing on the traditional ways?  Are we teaching the old songs? Are we participating in the ceremonies?  Are we showing the family members how to pray? Are we encouraging each family member to be spiritual?  Think about these things today.

My Creator, today, let me show respect to each family member.

 -- Elders.meditation@whitebison.org

HEALTH FRONT

Not in My Water Supply!

TIME Magazine 1016/05

By Margot Roosevelt-Bellingham

It hardens teeth and prevents cavities, but 60 years after it began, fluoridation is meeting new resistance 

Somebody put a dead rat in Curtis Smith's mailbox. Someone else has made anonymous phone calls accusing him of trying to poison his neighbors. And all around the usually placid university town of Bellingham, Wash., activists from a group called Citizens Against Forced Fluoride have planted lawn signs adorned with skull and crossbones. "I had no idea it would get this intense," says Smith, 70, a retired dentist who is leading a Nov. 8 ballot initiative to add fluoride to the local drinking water. "These are very angry people."

Angry indeed: fluoridation to fight tooth decay, a hot-button issue from the 1950s--when it was attacked as a communist plot--is back on the front burner and not just in Washington State. Fueled by health concerns, cancer fears and a grass-roots campaign that has flooded the Internet with anti-fluoridation Web pages, citizens across the U.S. are increasingly suspicious of what the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) considers "one of the 10 great public-health achievements of the 20th century." In the past three years, legislation to encourage fluoridation has been defeated or tabled in Oregon, Arkansas, Nebraska and Hawaii. New battles are brewing in New Jersey, Massachusetts and across the Canadian border in Montreal. 

No one disputes the fact that fluoride, a natural element found in rocks and groundwater, protects tooth enamel. Since 1945, municipal systems serving 170 million Americans have added fluoride (mostly in the form of hydrofluorosilicic acid) to their water, and the prevalence of cavities in the U.S. has fallen dramatically. "A community can save about $38 in dental-treatment costs for every $1 invested in fluoridation," says William Maas, the CDC's director of oral health. "How many other investments yield that kind of return?"  

But much has changed since 1945, starting with our toothpastes. Today fluoride is an ingredient in most brands of dentifrice on the market. Because toothpaste is designed to be spit out, it's a more efficient way to get the decay-fighting ingredient where it is needed and nowhere else. Even some dentists, who see firsthand the benefits of fluoridation, wonder whether people who get fluoride from toothpaste should get it in their drinking water as well.   

What has also changed is how much toxicologists know about the harmful effects of fluoride compounds. Ingested in high doses, fluoride is indisputably toxic; it was once commonly used in rat poison. Hydrogen fluoride is regulated as a hazardous pollutant in emissions from chemical plants and has been linked to respiratory illness. Even in toothpaste, sodium fluoride is a health concern. In 1997 the Food and Drug Administration toughened the warning on every tube to read, "If more than used for brushing is accidentally swallowed, get medical help or contact a poison-control center right away."  

The most recent--and controversial--charge links fluoridation with bone cancer. In June the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a watchdog organization, petitioned the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to list fluoride in tap water as a carcinogen. The group cited "decades of peer-review studies" on fluoride's "ability to mutate DNA and its known deposition on the ends of growing bones, the site of osteosarcoma"--a rare, often fatal cancer that affects mainly boys.  

Federal health officials view those concerns as exaggerated. Current standards rely on a 1993 review of published studies by the National Academy of Sciences, which found "no credible evidence for an association between fluoride in drinking water and the risk of cancer." The academy has launched a new review to be released in February.

The stakes were raised in July when Harvard University opened an investigation into whether a prominent dentistry professor had suppressed research by one of his doctoral students in a report to the NIH. The 2001 thesis showed a sevenfold increased risk of osteosarcoma in preadolescent boys from fluoridated water. The supervising professor, Chester Douglass, edits a newsletter funded by Colgate--which makes fluoridated toothpaste--creating "the appearance of a conflict of interest," according to the EWG, which filed a charge of "scientific misconduct" with the federal agency. Douglass was unavailable for comment, but a Harvard spokesman said the university takes the allegations "seriously."  

Meanwhile, unions representing 7,000 employees at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have waded into the debate. The optimal level of fluoride in water, according to the CDC, is between 0.7 and 1.2 parts per million. In 1985 political appointees at the EPA raised the acceptable level of fluoride in drinking water to 4 p.p.m., over objections from agency scientists. The Natural Resources Defense Council sued the agency, charging that the safety margin was inadequate, but in 1987 a U.S. district court ruled that the EPA administrators had the authority to set fluoride levels. EPA union representatives reopened the issue in August, calling on EPA administrator Stephen Johnson to issue a moratorium on fluoridation and to set a goal of zero fluoride in tap water. "The EPA has an ethical duty to send an effective warning immediately about this hazard," they said.

All this makes for a potent mix, especially when filtered through the Internet, where health-safety concerns tend to get amplified. Much of the opposition to the fluoridation initiative in Bellingham comes from people like Lane Weaver, a fire-alarm technician, and his wife Danelle, a housewife and mother of two. When they first heard about the issue this summer, the Weavers Googled the word fluoridation. Nine of the first 10 items that came up were decidedly anti-fluoride. "I was horrified," says Danelle. "Why would I want to put a toxic industrial chemical in my children's bodies?" She joined Citizens Against Forced Fluoride, and now--with a 6-in.-high stack of scientific studies gleaned from the Web--she staffs an information booth at the local farmers' market.  

If the risks of water fluoridation are hotly debated, quantifying its benefits is also tricky. In the 1950s, advocates claimed a 60% drop in cavities. But with the spread of fluoride toothpastes and the use of plastic sealants by dentists, decay has plummeted even in regions where there is little or no fluoride in the water. A 2001 CDC study found that by the time they were 12, kids in fluoridated communities averaged only 1.4 fewer cavities than those in non-fluoridated areas. And even in fluoridated cities, severe decay remains rampant among the poor--partly because some 85% of dentists, according to state surveys, reject Medicaid patients. Still, for those with little dental care, water fluoridation makes a difference, contends Bellingham's Curtis Smith. "Twenty percent of our kids account for 80% of the cavities," he says. "With fluoride in the water, they would get a blast every time they drink."

But in parsing risks, Bellingham is also weighing an undisputed side effect of ingestion. The CDC recently announced that 32% of American children now have some form of dental fluorosis, a white or brown mottling of the teeth. U.S. health officials see it as a cosmetic issue, largely caused by ill-advised swallowing of toothpaste, while fluoride critics say it shows that children are accumulating too much fluoride overall. The World Health Organization sets a fluoride-safety standard of 1.5 p.p.m.--well below the EPA's 4-p.p.m. rule--partly to prevent enamel fluorosis. And in Western Europe, where the drop in tooth decay in recent decades is as sharp as that in the U.S., 17 of 21 countries have either refused or discontinued fluoridation, contending that fluoride toothpastes offer adequate protection. (Only Ireland adds fluoride to most of its water systems, while Switzerland fluoridates its salt.)

Those facts, recycled through Web-savvy organizations like the Fluoride Action Network, are stirring up activists. While city councils and water boards tend to fluoridate when they have the power, the electorate is far more divided. Over the past five years, the practice was voted down in 38 of 79 referendums, from Modesto, Calif., to Worcester, Mass. "The Internet is making it light-years more difficult to fluoridate," says Smith. The Washington State Dental Association is backing his $300,000 pro-fluoride campaign. Danelle Weaver and her friends, meanwhile, have raised less than $10,000. But they are undaunted. "People think we are tinfoil hatters," says Weaver, "but we're just average families who take the time to research and want what's best for our children." That goal is the only thing both sides seem to share.  

To show your support for the EPA unions and sign a petition calling for a moratorium go to:   http://petition.powalliance.org/index.html

Health Watch...

DIABETES EPIDEMIC! 

Among American Indians

According to the National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse (NDIC),  "...diabetes  is a chronic epidemic among American Indians."  On average, they are 2.8 times as likely to have diagnosed diabetes as non-Hispanic whites of similar age.  For example, among the Pima Indians of Arizona, about 50 percent of people between the ages of 30 and 64 have diabetes.  From 1984 to 1986, diabetes was the sixth leading cause of death among American Indians and Alaska Natives.  Between 1986 and 1988, the death rate for diabetes in American Indians is estimated to be 4.3 times the rate in non-Hispanic whites.  Diabetes contributes to several of the leading causes of death in American Indians: heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, pneumonia, and influenza.

     Manataka is deeply committed to helping our brothers and sisters combat this terrible disease.  Here are two suggestions that will help:

1.  Fight the Cause: Stop eating government commodities - especially white flour, white sugar, white salt, white rice -- if it is white -- it ain't right!  

2.  Treat the Cause:  Take Diabeticine tablets daily for at least six months.   

Diabeticine™ is proven to be successful and goes to the cellular level to lower your blood sugar level, lower your insulin resistance, and increase insulin production. It contains all-natural ingredients, in its purest form, that are essential to making it gentle and effective, unlike prescription drugs that may have harmful side-effects to you. Diabeticine™ has been scientifically engineered and a partial list of the ingredients are:  

Banaba, Guggle, Bitter Melon, Licorice extract, Cinnamon herb powder, Gymnema Sylvestre, Yarrow, Cayenne, Juniper Berries, Huckleberry, Vanadyl Sulfate

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