Harlyn Geronimo accuses Prescott Bush of having stolen the bones American Indian leader Geronimo

Legend has it that Yale University's ultrasecret Skull and Bones society swiped the remains of American Indian leader Geronimo nearly a century ago from an army outpost in Oklahoma, and now Geronimo's great-grandson wants the remains returned. Harlyn Geronimo, of Mescalero, N.M., wants to prove the skull and bones that were purported spirited from the Indian leader's burial plot in Fort Sill, Okla., to a stone tomb that serves as the club's headquarters are in fact those of his great-grandfather. If so, he wants to bury them near Geronimo's birthplace in southern New Mexico's Gila Wilderness.

"He died as a prisoner of war, and he is still a prisoner of war because his remains were not returned to his homeland," said Harlyn Geronimo, 59. "Presently, we are looking for a proper consecrated burial."

If the bones aren't those of Geronimo, Harlyn Geronimo is certain they belonged to one of the Apache prisoners who died at Fort Sill. He said they should still be returned.

Harlyn Geronimo sent a letter last year to President Bush, asking for his help in recovering the bones. He figures since the president's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was allegedly one of those who helped steal the bones in 1918, the president would want to help return them to their rightful place. But Harlyn Geronimo said: "I haven't heard a word.
http://www.newsday.com/search/sns-ap-geronimos-bones,0,7508033.story

Dear Cecil:

I'm getting mixed signals on a story about the great Native American leader Geronimo. According to various references, his bones were stolen from his grave in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he was a prisoner until his death. Some accounts claim they now reside in the famous Tomb at Yale's Skull and Bones Society. One version of the story has the president's grandfather, Prescott Bush, being the man who took them. Any definitive answer on this? --Ben Fenwick, Oklahoma City

Cecil replies:

This story has everything--famous names, a secret society, a generous helping of the macabre. What it doesn't have a lot of is facts. Here's one thing we can say for sure: that the young whippersnappers at Skull and Bones, a supposedly-but-not-really supersecret undergraduate society at Yale, thought for years that they had Geronimo's bones in their clubhouse, the Tomb. On the far-from-certain list is this: that they ever did.

The legendary Apache warrior Geronimo died a captive of the U.S. Army at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1909 and was buried there in an Apache cemetery. As far as anybody knew that's where the body stayed until the 1980s, when Ned Anderson, a leader of the San Carlos Apache, agitated to have Geronimo's remains returned to his native Arizona. In the wake of the publicity Anderson's group got an unexpected letter. The writer, claiming to be a member of Skull and Bones, said Geronimo's bones had been stolen by several S&B alumni during a late-night grave robbery in 1918, apparently while the men were serving as army officers at Fort Sill. The bones supposedly had been on private display at the Tomb ever since. The letter writer subsequently delivered a photo showing a display case with a skull in it and a picture of Geronimo nearby, plus a copy of a purported internal S&B history telling of the 1918 raid. ("Crooks"--exploits in which members steal treasures from nonmembers, or "barbarians"--are a hallowed S&B tradition.) According to the history, one of the thieves was Prescott Bush, father of U.S. president number 41 and grandfather of number 43.

The outraged Apache traveled to New York to meet with S&B representatives and demand that Geronimo's S&B be returned. In one account of the meetings the S&B people admit, "We have a skull that we call Geronimo." Alexandra Robbins, in Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power (2002), says S&B offered to give the Apache the abovementioned display case and a skull. But they also said they'd had the skull examined and found it wasn't Geronimo's but rather that of a ten-year-old boy. Suspicious, the Apache refused the offer, and there's been no progress to speak of since. The story still surfaces occasionally, playing into rants about the perfidy of the Bush family, S&B as an arm of the Illuminati, callous treatment of Native Americans, and so on.

But here's the thing: There's no good reason to believe Geronimo's remains ever left Oklahoma, and plenty of reasons to think they didn't. One obvious problem is the description of the theft in the S&B history: "The ring of pick on stone and thud of earth on earth alone disturbs the peace of the prairie. An axe pried open the iron door of the tomb, and Pat Bush entered and started to dig. . . . At the exact bottom of the small round hole, Pat James dug deep and pried out the trophy itself. . . . We quickly closed the grave, shut the door and sped home."

What a hoot, eh? Trouble is, the description bears no relationship to the actual burial place, which wasn't a mausoleum with a door, as the account suggests, but rather a conventional grave in the ground. An S&B representative has described the "crook" account as a hoax, and no less than celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley, in The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty (2004), writes that the whole thing was a tall tale cooked up by Prescott Bush and friends that made its way into S&B lore. OK, so Kelley isn't a sterling source, but most accounts agree that stories of Geronimo's bones having been moved were circulating before 1918--put in play, perhaps, by the local Apache in hopes of discouraging thieves. (Today the grave is covered by a concrete slab and marked with a pyramid of stones, but these were added after 1918.) A Fort Sill spokesman tells me, "There is no evidence to indicate the bones are anywhere but in the grave site."

One never knows, of course. Conceivably if the various Apache factions got together and demanded that the grave be exhumed, the feds would cave and we could settle the matter once and for all. As it stands, I'm betting what's left of Geronimo is still at Fort Sill.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/051111.html

Native Americans 12 million - Four centuries later 237 thousand



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gQcoOSKx7M

"By conservative estimates, the population of the United states prior to European contact was greater than 12 million. Four centuries later, the count was reduced by 95% to 237 thousand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2EyPWqXpVg

But all the white men said Thats the cross of changes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R9ulGK5nU8&eurl=


Silent Warrior


Long ago, for many years
White men came in the name of god
They took their land, they took their lives
A new age has just begun

They lost their gods, they lost their smile
They cried for help for the last time.
Liberty was turning into chains
But all the white men said
Thats the cross of changes

In the name of God - the fight for gold
These were the changes.
Tell me - is it right - in the name of god
These kind of changes?

They tried to fight for liberty
Without a chance in hell, they gave up.
White men won in the name of god
With the cross as alibi

Theres no God who ever tried
To change the world in this way.
For the ones who abuse his name
There'll be no chance to escape
On judgement day

In the name of God - the fight for gold
These were the changes.
Tell me - is it right - in the name of god
These kind of changes?

Tell me why, tell me why, tell why
The white men said:
Thats the cross of changes ?

Tell me why, tell me why, tell why,
In the name of god
These kind of changes


$40 billion--from Washington - betrayal for more than a century

http://www.hocakworak.com/archive/2001/WL%202001%2010-24/HW-011024-3.htm

The Broken Promise

On the wall next to Elouise Cobell's desk is a blown-up reproduction of a famous Peanuts cartoon strip. After Lucy assures Charlie Brown, "Trust me," she once again snatches away the football he's about to kick, and he ends up flat on his back.
"I decided to stop being Charlie Brown," Cobell told me for her, "Lucy" is the U.S. Government. Now 55, barely 5 feet 4, a wife and a mother, Cobell is a member of the Blackfeet Indian tribe sequestered in the northwest corner of Montana. As a result of a lawsuit she filed on behalf of her fellow Native Americans, they finally are about to collect a staggering sum of money--as much as $40 billion--from Washington.



Losing (or stealing) Native American trust


http://maroon.uchicago.edu/viewpoints/articles/2005/05/19/losing_or_stealing_n.php

For over a century, the Individual Indian Money (IIM) trust has snatched American Indians’ rightful profits by pinching funds from destitute Native nations. An eight-year lawsuit, Cobell v. Norton, aims to make the government pay what they rightfully owe, but, surprise, surprise, the feds can’t even account for the missing funds, and are dragging their feet all the way to the bank. It’s time the government dealt honestly with American Indian nations—if only to try something new.

In the 1880s, the IIM trust was established to collect funds owed to Native peoples for the use of their lands, initiated by the Dawes Act. The act broke up tribal territory into individually owned 80-to-160-acre parcels at the behest of land-hungry settlers, and for the purposes of so-called “detribalization.” To “civilize” them via private property, individual American Indians were given “beneficial ownership” of the plots that, as a sovereign nation, were rightfully theirs; meanwhile, as the parcels’ “trustee,” the government was supposed to manage and distribute revenues collected from the lands back to the Indians who owned them.

Unsurprisingly, the system benefited only the feds. As profits from mining, forestry, and gas extraction continue to pour into IIM, American Indians have seen little of the cash. Under the Bush administration, for instance, the Bureau of Indian Affairs approved lowball deals for oil pipelines on Native property in New Mexico—American Indian recipients got $25 to $40 per rod (a unit for measuring pipeline) while private landowners received anywhere from $140 to $575 per rod. Mishandling of Indian trust funds, however, remains a bipartisan effort: Bill Clinton’s Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbitt, was the first defendant in the Cobell litigation, and was held in contempt of court for stonewalling on court-ordered records.

“It would be difficult to find a more historically mismanaged federal program than the IIM trust,” reads Cobell v. Babbitt, a recent court decision on the subject. The government isn’t even sure how many accounts exist, let alone the amount of cash due to each. What’s more, the situation appears worse than a case of simple bureaucratic incompetence. In May 1999, the U.S. Treasury confessed to destroying 162 boxes of relevant documents on the case, for which they were chastised by a court-appointed Special Master the following December. The Treasury Department clearly took this admonishment to heart when they destroyed a second crop of documents less than a year later.

Until Cobell v. Norton is resolved, Indians won’t see a penny of the money owed them and their nations—a figure estimated to be in the billions. And it looks like the end is nowhere in sight for the suit’s 500,000 plaintiffs. The government has yet to even account for the stolen funds, never mind compensating the plaintiffs. The trust funds are much needed in Native communities, where poverty rates hover around 25 percent.

In 1994, Oklahoma Congressman Mike Synar remarked, “If this was done in the Social Security system, my colleagues, we would have had a war.” The official policy of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, then, is war on American Indian communities. In other words: business as usual.


http://infosecuritymag.techtarget.com/ss/0,295796,sid6_iss446_art918,00.html


Broken Trust

The government exposed thousands of Native Americans' financial data to hackers. Elouise Cobell forced the government off the Internet.

BY LAWRENCE WALSH

"Temporarily Unavailable" reads the notice on the Bureau of Indian Affairs Web site. Temporary, in this case, is nearly three years...and counting.

A U.S. District Court judge ordered the Department of the Interior to disconnect from the Internet in 2001 because of concerns raised in a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of a half-million Native Americans, who are suing the government for mismanaging the Individual Indian Money (IIM) trust fund.

"It's all about broken trust," says Elouise Pepion Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet tribe and the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit (officially known as Cobell v. Norton), which claims the government can't account for as much as $150 billion the fund has collected over the last 117 years.

The disconnection has had an impact. Nearly 10,000 government employees have no Internet or e-mail access and must do business by telephone, snail-mail and fax machines. Interior officials say the ban is driving up operations costs because remote Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) employees can't access online applications; some have to drive long distances just to file paperwork.

Next month, the government will head back to court, seeking to have the order lifted. A reversal is the worst possible outcome for Cobell, who says data security is essential if there's ever to be a full accounting of the trust fund.


The Bureau of Indian Affairs has been "Temporarily Unavailable" since December 2001, when the court ordered it to disconnect until the government demonstrates adequate security.
"The government mandates that financial firms have all sorts of security in place. If they didn't have them, the government would be on them in a New York second," says Cobell, a banker and executive director of the Native American Community Development Corp.

...and searched the place? it's just a fraternity house...not fort knox. what are the drunk repub frat boys gonna do about it....call their daddy? why doesn't somebody go in there and kick some ass? they might not find geronimo's remains but you can bet they'd uncover a lot of illegal activities. there's probably more child molestation going on in there than in the catholic church. remember, these are republicans.