During the recent restoration of Pinturicchio‘s Resurrection fresco (1494) on the wall of the Hall of Mysteries in the Borgia Apartment at the Vatican has revealed what may be the first images of Native Americans in European art. Vatican Museums Director Antonio Paolucci believes a detail in the artwork refers to the natives of the American continent that explorer Christopher Columbus encountered when he travelled to the New World for the first time.

”Just behind the Resurrection, behind a soldier who is enthralled by the incredible event he is seeing, you are able to discern nude men wearing feathers who appear to be dancing,” Paolucci said.

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The billboard was paid for by a group of locals who asked to remain anonymous, according to Lamar Advertising, which spoke with KUSA.

From the AP:

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On Tuesday night, the House Rules Committee sent the House Republican version of the bill for a floor vote, where it is expected to fail. This version stripped out the expanded protections, but was soundly rejected by Democratic leadership. If it does fail, the Rules Committee said the Senate version will be taken up instead with an up-or-down vote.

As Sahil Kapur from TPM explains, there is a method to the maneuvering:

The big admission implicit in this latest move is that House GOP leaders don’t believe they have the votes to pass their version of the bill but that the Senate version is likely to pass the chamber. So this way they’ll give House conservatives the first bite at the apple as a way of saving face and still resolve an issue that has hurt them politically.

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Native Americans on an oil-rich North Dakota reservation have been cheated out of more than $1 billion by schemes to buy drilling rights for lowball prices, a flurry of recent lawsuits assert. And, the suits claim, the federal government facilitated the alleged swindle by failing in its legal obligation to ensure the tribes got a fair deal.

This is a story as old as America itself, given a new twist by fracking and the boom that technology has sparked in North Dakota oil country. Since the late 1800s, the U.S. government has appropriated much of the original tribal lands associated with the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota for railroads and white homesteaders. A devastating blow was delivered when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri River in 1953, flooding more than 150,000 acres at the heart of the remaining reservation. Members of the Three Affiliated Tribes — the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara — were forced out of the fertile valley and up into the arid and barren surrounding hills, where they live now.

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Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, introduced the scaled-back version of the bill, which failed by a vote of 34-65. Among the 34 Republicans to vote for the bill were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., the only female senator who is not a co-sponsoring the version of the VAWA that will likely be voted on on Monday.

The new protections for LGBT, immigrant and Native American women were a big reason why Republicans opposed the reauthorization bill in the last session of Congress. VAWA had been allowed to expire in September, 2011, and stalled several times over the course of 2012.

From the Huffington Post, Grassley's version would also reorient the law to focus on men as well:

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The tribal court provisions. Currently, non-Native men who abuse Native American women on reservations can — and do — get away with it, since federal prosecutors can’t and don’t prosecute all such cases. The expanded VAWA would give tribal courts jurisdiction, something that has met with remarkably vehement opposition by some Republicans, who seem to fear that the mostly white men it would affect would have their rights violated. Notably, not all Republicans: congressmen Tom Cole and Darrell Issa have proposed a compromise that would allow those men to appeal to the feds if they objected to their treatment by the tribal courts, and Cole met with Eric Cantor about it yesterday.

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Here's our guide to the most sinister forces of what some conservatives are calling the "War on Thanksgiving":

• Barack Obama: Let's start at the top. Last year, the president was alternately trashed by conservatives for not mentioning God in his Thanksgiving Day YouTube address and for describing the Obama family's Thanksgiving Day plans thusly: "Like millions of Americans, Michelle, Malia, Sasha and I will spend the day eating great food, watching a little football, and reflecting on how truly lucky we truly are." Social conservative Bryan Fischer was quite angry about the "luck" thing, saying that it really "grinds my gears" to hear the president talk that way, and this "is the most offensive thing that  I've ever heard President Obama say: that we are lucky, that everything we enjoy in America is the result of pure luck. It's not. It has to do with our values, it has to do with our faith in God, it has to do with God's providential care."

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In the video, which is still easily obtainable on the Web, Stefani plays a blond, alabaster-skinned Indian maiden in a rickety Old West town who can still writhe seductively when tied up and knows how to send hot pink smoke signals. There's also some dancing. And wolves. But not dancing with wolves. Eventually, her Indian chief Tony Kamal rescues Stefani from her wicked bandmates, and from the looks of things, a lot of money was spent in the storytelling.

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The term "Manifest Destiny" described the widely held 19th century belief that the United States, a young nation ruled by men of European descent, was divinely destined to spread across the North American continent. It was the ideology underpinning the Mexican-American war of the 1840s and the violent occupation of indigenous lands.

And now, the Gap has slapped it on a T-shirt.

According to Indian Country, Today Media Network, "Apparel manufacturer The Gap is currently selling a black t-shirt bearing — with no explanation — the words MANIFEST DESTINY'." Activists have been reacting to the clothes item with angry letters and boycott pledges. Indian Country reprinted a letter to the Gap from activist actress and member of Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes Renee Roman Nose. She wrote:

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“(In our culture), the medicine man is at the top of the social hierarchy,” says Gillson, who is of Navajo descent.

“When healers breech the trust placed in them (and) prey on others wearing the cloak of health and harmony, it increases my passion to personally prosecute the case.”

Last month, Francis Nez, a 62-year-old medicine man from Gallup NM, was charged with two counts of sexually assaulting two girls in his family.

What troubled Gillson was that Nez hadn’t been the first. At least two similar cases have occurred in the vast Navajo reservation spanning four states in the U.S. Southwest—the country’s largest autonomous reservation—over the past decade.

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But you might not want to make snow cones out of it. Because this year at Snowbowl, that twinkling white powder will be made from human sewage.

Three cheers for America’s innovative capitalists, who are leading the world in turning shit into snow. This year, the Arizona ski resort, located near Flagstaff, will become the first ever to charge humans to glide about in their own waste: 100% pure sewage effluent. How’d you like to face-plant in that?

If that’s not horrible enough, the mountain is sacred to Native Americans, who are outraged over its desecration. Navajo Klee Benally has spent years fighting the resort’s expansion. But in February, a federal appeals court ruled in favor the plans, which had been opposed by 13 Native American tribes and environmental groups.

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According to WCVB-TV in Boston, several staffers were making "war whoops" and "tomahawk chops" at a rally for Brown in Boston:

"Brown's deputy Chief of Staff Greg Casey and Constituent Service Counsel Jack Richard, and GOP operative Brad Garrett are pictured in the video, NewsCenter 5's Janet Wu confirmed."

Watch:

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After weeks of debate over personhood, Planned Parenthood funding, transvaginal ultrasounds, fetal pain, Fluke-fest, aspirin-between-the-knees, and the little matter of 130,000 economically disadvantaged Texas women losing access to basic health care starting today, discussions about the accessibility of Plan B seem so... December 2011. Ancient history.

But for one group of women, access to emergency contraception is an urgent and tragically unmet need: the hundreds of thousands of Native American women who live on reservation lands. Their struggle for a better standard of care is the subject of a recent roundtable discussion by the Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center (NAWHERC).

The statistics are stark. More than 1 in 3 Native American women will be sexually assaulted their lifetimes, a rate much higher than the general population. In one study, a stunning 92 percent of young women reported they had been forced to have sex against their will on a date.

Read more on her Open Salon blog.

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Earlier this month, Obama said the U.S. would support the U.N.'s "Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People," a non-legally binding promise to finally treat indigenous peoples with some small amount of decency after hundreds of years of the government murdering them and expelling them from their homes and forcibly relocating them to barren desert ghettos and now just letting them live in conditions of appalling, abject poverty. Bush refused to sign on to this, because, I dunno, it was from the U.N., and it might lead to frivolous lawsuits, or something? It's a non-binding Declaration that basically says "we will be nice to indigenous people," there's no good reason not to support it.

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The buyer was identified by the auction house Sotheby's in New York as an American private collector. Frayed, torn, and with possible bloodstains, the flag had been valued before its sale at up to $5 million.

Since 1895, the 7th U.S. Cavalry flag -- known as a "guidon" for its swallow-tailed shape -- had been the property of the Detroit Institute of Arts, which paid just $54 for it.

Custer and more than 200 troopers were massacred by Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors in the infamous 1876 battle. Of the five guidons carried by Custer's battalion only one was immediately recovered, from beneath the body of a fallen trooper.

And while Custer's reputation has risen and fallen over the years -- once considered a hero, he's regarded by some contemporary scholars as an inept leader and savage American Indian killer -- the guidon has emerged as the stuff of legend.

"It's more than just a museum object or textile. It's a piece of Americana," said John Doerner, Chief Historian at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in southeastern Montana.

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The president has invited the leaders of each of the 565 federally recognized tribes to the event, the White House announced Monday. It would be Obama's second conference with American Indians. Obama first met with tribal leaders last November.

The president says he wants tribal leaders to be able to interact with him and with top administration officials.

Last year's event drew leaders from 386 tribal nations and was the first meeting of its kind in 15 years.

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The two sides agreed on the deal after more than 10 months of negotiations. The government and the Indian plaintiffs met in federal court Tuesday to present the settlement to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan.

The agreement also includes $80 million in farm debt forgiveness for the Indian plaintiffs and a series of initiatives to try and alleviate racism against American Indians and other minorities in rural farm loan offices. Individuals who can prove discrimination could receive up to $250,000.

A hearing on preliminary approval of the deal is set for Oct. 29. Sullivan indicated he was pleased with the agreement, calling it historic and coming down off his bench to shake hands with lawyers from both sides.

Assistant Attorney General Tony West and Joseph Sellers, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, both said they were encouraged by the judge's positive reaction.

"Based on the court's comments, we're optimistic," West said after the hearing adjourned.

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That's the gist of "King Philip's War," a board game based on a bloody and violent clash of the same name between colonists and Indian tribes in 17th-century New England, and developed by a company partly owned by former major league pitcher Curt Schilling.

The game's designer says he hopes to educate children and others about a war that cost thousands of lives but receives scant attention in history books. But some Native Americans want the game blocked from release, saying it trivializes the conflict and insensitively perpetuates a stereotype of Indian tribes as bellicose savages.

Tribal members protested the game in Providence last month, and a Facebook group with more than 260 members urges a Maryland-based company, MultiManPublishing, to halt production.

"From what I've seen right now: totally inappropriate, highly offensive, nowhere near ready to be in production," said Annawon Weeden, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoags in Massachusetts, who is familiar with the game but has not played it. "It's just a way to have fun reliving a tragedy."

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"I don't know those songs," replied Cash, "but I got a few of my own I can play for you." Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of "Okie From Muskogee." With the nation still mired in Vietnam, Cash had far more than prison reform on his mind. Nixon listened with a frozen smile to the singer's rendition of the explicitly antiwar "What Is Truth?" and "Man in Black" ("Each week we lose a hundred fine young men") and to a folk protest song about the plight of Native Americans called "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." It was a daring confrontation with a president who was popular with Cash's fans and about to sweep to a crushing reelection victory, but a glimpse of how Cash saw himself -- a foe of hypocrisy, an ally of the downtrodden. An American protest singer, in short, as much as a country music legend.

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