In wake of Charlottesville, new scrutiny for Native American statues
By Martha T. Moore Stateline.org (TNS) - Jul 29, 2018

WASHINGTON — The controversy that swept Southern states over Confederate monuments is spreading across the nation, as cities contend with calls to remove statues depicting stereotyped and subjugated Native Americans.
Among them: a sculpture in San Francisco’s Pioneer Monument near City Hall that shows a Native American at the feet of a Spanish missionary and vaquero, and one in New York City that depicts a Native American and an African holding the stirrups of Theodore Roosevelt astride a horse. Earlier this year in Kalamazoo, Mich., a granite sculpture from the city’s Fountain of the Pioneers was trucked away to storage. It showed a pioneer, weapon raised, rising above a Native American.
In all three cases, Native Americans have criticized the statues as inaccurate, demeaning and racist for decades. Red paint symbolizing blood was splashed over the Roosevelt statue as long ago as 1971, and as recently as October.
But the deadly violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., last August has prompted renewed activism from Native Americans protesting statues in their own communities. It has also shifted attitudes among some city officials, who now recognize that they have monuments akin to Confederate statues in their own backyards.
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Tim Giago: Some of our own people are guilty of racial prejudice too
Posted: Monday, July 30, 2018 
Notes from Indian Country: Fighting racial prejudice among our own people
By Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji – Stands Up For Them)

After being in the news business for more than 35 years I suppose nothing should surprise me.
But watching some of the Lakota people go backwards in time when it comes to race relations still bothers me. Several weeks ago I wrote a column about the faces on Mount Rushmore and how all of the Presidents on the mountain expressed harsh feeling towards American Indians. Perhaps it was something that some people with thin-skin and even thinner knowledge of history did not want to know.
One indignant writer attacked me as a phony because of my name, Giago. He wrote that my grandfather’s first name was Jesus and therefore that makes me a Mexican. He wrote as if he was revealing some deep, dark secret that I had tried to keep under wraps. I have never been ashamed to write about my heritage and I go into depth about it in the preface of my book Children Left Behind.
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Sen. Jeff Merkley tries to force White House to finish tribal housing work on Columbia River
Updated May 12, 2018; Posted May 12, 2018
By Molly Harbarger - mharbarger@oregonian.com
The Oregonian/OregonLive

The director of the federal Office of Management and Budget says that nowhere is it written he has to fund housing developments for Columbia River tribal members. So, the Northwest's congressional delegation plans to put it in writing.
Mick Mulvaney told Oregon and Washington lawmakers last October that he would not free up the $1.6 million in funding they expected, despite a 1950s-era law that authorizes the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build homes for tribal members displaced when a dam was built near The Dalles. Nor was he swayed that funds had been appropriated by the outgoing head of the Army Corps under President Barack Obama or the fact that half the work was already done.
Since then, tribal delegations and lawmakers have met with Mulvaney's staff and called the director himself advocating for the project, to no avail.
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Trump wants Senator Warren to prove her heritage with a DNA test.
Here’s why that may not work, “Everyone here is racially mixed”: Experts explain why it’s “wrong to think genetics” can infer native heritage
ANDREW LAWLER
JULY 29, 2018 11:30PM (UTC)

President Donald Trump recently offered to give $1 million to Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s favorite charity. All the Massachusetts Democrat has to do is follow the instructions from an off-the-shelf DNA kit and publicize the results. It sounds like a reasonable way to resolve the ugly dispute over her claims to Native American ancestry. Even newspapers that endorsed the Democratic senator and some Native Americans are urging her to take the spit test.
After all, Warren’s insistence that she is of Cherokee descent is her “Achilles heel,” noted the Berkshire Eagle. “The same technology that can match a perpetrator to a crime with virtually 100 percent certainty could settle the question of her heritage for all time,” the editors wrote in an op-ed.
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