A panel, “The Chukchansi Legitimacy Crisis: One Year Later,” on Thursday, Feb. 28, at Fresno State will examine inter-tribal disputes centered around disenrollment issues, election disputes, management practices and the standoff at the tribal government offices of the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians one year ago.
The event, from 6-8 p.m. in the Peters Business Building, Room 191, is free and open to the public.
Presented by the Department of Political Science, the event also commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Wounded Knee battle, said Dr. Kenneth Hansen, associate professor of Political Science and event organizer. He is a former co-coordinator of the then-Africana and American Indian Studies program.
He and fellow professor, Dr. Charles Ettner, a Blackfoot who teaches Anthropology, Linguistics and in the American Indian Studies Program, will lead the panel that includes Fresno State alumna Dora Jones, a former Tribal Council member who was suspended from the board after the standoff; Patrick Hammond, also a former Tribal Council member and treasurer; enrollment activist Cathy Cory, who is a disenrolled Chukchansi Yokuts Indian; and Susan Holguin-Juarez, a disenrolled Chukchansi tribal elder and former employee of the tribal government.
Feb. 28 marks one year since conflict over a council election dispute between a group of Chukchansi elders and their supporters, and the Chukchansi Tribal Council. That date is also the anniversary of the 1973 battle of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, during which members of the American Indian Movement occupied the site for 71 days to protest conditions on the reservation.
For more information about the panel, contact Dr. Hansen at kennethh@csufresno.edu.
