Letter: Temple Bat Yam works at B&B

To the community,

On Aug. 15, Bread & Broth served 125 nutritious meals at St. Theresa Grace Hall to those in our community who struggle with hunger. Thanks to the generosity of Friends of Temple Bat Yam, the dinner’s adopt a day sponsor; the diners enjoyed a tasty Mexican casserole prepared by B&B’s amazing cooks.

The dinner guests also were provided with bags filled with dairy products, fruits, vegetables, breads and pastries provided by donations from local businesses and B&B donors.

Helping the B&B volunteers to setup and serve at Temple Bat Yam’s AAD dinner were sponsor crew members Naomi and Shelly Zimbler and Debra and Eduardo Day.

All four of these crewmembers are veteran sponsor crew volunteers that made them extremely helpful in assisting with the dinner.

“Another gratifying day working with the wonderful volunteers from B&B and helping those less fortunate,” was Shelly Zimbler’s response to another stint volunteering at a Bread & Broth dinner.

B&B is gratified to have the support of this wonderful community Temple and its members.

For almost 27 years, Bread & Broth has been serving the community by providing Monday evening meals every week at Grace Hall. Seven years ago, Second Serving began serving soup and a small entrée at Lake Tahoe Community Presbyterian Church every Friday and last September food insecure K-8 LTUSD began receiving weekend food during the school year. It is our community members, exemplified by the Friends of Temple Bat Yam, who make this all possible.

Carol Gerard, Bread & Broth 




Opinion: Resources needed to battle Nev. opioid epidemic

By Tom Vilsack and Brian Sandoval

In Nevada and across the country, opioid addiction is a fast-growing problem that disproportionately affects rural communities. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows opioids were involved in 28,648 deaths in 2014, meaning more Americans are dying from drug overdoses than in motor vehicle crashes each year.

Nevada has been hit particularly hard by this epidemic. Tragically, 382 people in the Silver State died of drug overdoses in 2014. Chances are, readers of this column have been affected by a loved one’s addiction, or know someone who has. In fact, a recent poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 44 percent of Americans personally know someone who has been addicted to prescription pain medication.

This is a health crisis, and it is going to take serious action from all levels of government, the health care community, law enforcement and others to turn those numbers around.

Read the whole story




Letter: UNR speaks out on Kaepernick

To the community,

The Reno-Tahoe International Airport and Wolf Pack Athletics have been in discussion regarding an announcement to update the Wolf Pack wall at the airport. Three years ago, the wall was designed to allow for updates and the new display materials will support an exciting announcement coming within a few months.

Until then, the display at the airport and anything else on campus will remain intact as it is currently.

The University of Nevada, Reno will not abandon the many contributions that one of our graduates, Colin Kaepernick, made during his time at the university, based on his expression of the constitutional right afforded to citizens of the United States to express their views, whether in a controversial manner or not.

The university is a place where we encourage open and meaningful dialogue, free speech and differences of opinion.

Marc Johnson, UNR president




Opinion: Why is pot still a Schedule I drug?

By Nathaniel P. Morris, Scientific American

On Aug. 11, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced its decision to keep marijuana classified as a Schedule I drug. The federal government has historically referred to this category as the “most dangerous” group of substances, including drugs like heroin and bath salts.

As a resident physician specializing in mental health, I can’t make much sense of this.

Every day, I talk to patients about substance abuse. Whether evaluating patients in clinic, in the emergency department, or on inpatient units, my colleagues and I screen patients for substance use. It’s a vital component of any clinical interview, particularly in mental health care, and helps us understand patients’ habits and their risks for medical complications.

Read the whole story




Editorial: Time for all of Nevada to get along

Publisher’s note: This editorial is from the Aug. 28, 2016, Las Vegas Sun.

Between possibly attracting the Oakland Raiders to Las Vegas, expanding the Las Vegas Convention Center and making major improvements in our public transportation system, Southern Nevada could be on the cusp of an exciting new era.

But as work intensifies to bring those projects to reality, all of a sudden there’s grumbling up north over using tax dollars to fund them.

That grumbling needs to stop. Now.

It’s time for Nevada’s leaders — north and south — to work together to do what’s best for Las Vegas, because what happens here benefits the entire state.

Read the whole story




Opinion: SLTPD new look, SWAT operations

By Brian Uhler

The officers and staff of the South Lake Tahoe Police Department have undertaken a review appearance of the SLTPD vehicles and have concluded with a new design.

Brian Uhler

Brian Uhler

The new look depicts our patch, which we are all proud to wear. The background includes a mountain scene which represents our good fortune to serve in such a beautiful place. The old logo was rather generic with just lettering on the doors. I hope you like the new look.

I recently had the pleasure of going with our SWAT team as they served a search and arrest warrant for a man who committed a robbery with a gun. It was impressive to watch our troops in action. In today’s times, it is imperative to be in control and present a calm demeanor.

As the officers did their job, there was no yelling or fast, seemingly hurried actions. Instead, the voice on the MRAP armored vehicle’s public address system asking for those inside to come out was calm and the officers moved with a deliberate pace. The unfolding of events was methodical and
clear to everyone who may have had an opportunity view.

SLTPD has a new logo.

SLTPD has a new logo.

As a police chief who has more than 19 years of serving in a variety of SWAT capacities, I am proud of the SLTPD’s team and impressed with their cool nature. The public can be reassured that if things ever get really bad, your police department will handle themselves with professionalism and
respect for all concerned—even the suspect(s).

Brian Uhler is chief of police for South Lake Tahoe.




Opinion: Big Foot is worried about California

By Bigfoot (as told to Joe Mathews)

Some people doubt my existence. But, my fellow Californians, I’m one of you.

And as I travel widely, my fears have grown about our home state. My anxiety is not because of all the people who claim to have seen me, but because I’m seeing far too much of all of you.

Joe Mathews

Joe Mathews

Yes, it’s true that there have been a few more sightings of me in Washington state (about 450, according to various Bigfoot trackers) than California (about 400). But every hair on my body calls California home. The most famous pictures of me (the Patterson-Gimlin film of 1967) were taken in the Golden State. And I’ve always been proud of the way I bring its disparate regions together, from Bigfoot-themed bars in L.A. to the Bigfoot Discovery Museum in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I bridge Hollywood (which made me famous on TV and in film) and Silicon Valley (Did you see me in Google ads during the Olympics?).

I spend most of my time in the far north of the state—there’s a reason Siskiyou, Del Norte and Humboldt counties boast the most sightings of yours truly. I’m particularly loyal to the tiny Humboldt town of Willow Creek, the world’s unofficial Bigfoot capital. This Labor Day weekend, as usual, I’ll ride down Willow Creek’s Main Street in the parade for the annual Bigfoot Days celebration, check in on my artifacts a local museum, and watch the lawn mower race, the hirsute’s answer to the Grand Prix.

Seeing old friends will be fun. But I must confess I miss the solitude I used to enjoy when I had California’s wilder areas mostly to myself.

These days I’m encountering so many people in our state’s once-remote precincts that I can hardly get a moment’s peace. The marijuana-industrial complex is relentlessly pushing into the lightly populated regions I favor; the noise of their trucks—bringing in soil, shipping out the finished product—disturbs my sleep. California’s urban housing shortage is forcing more people to build in places near my remote haunts. And that doesn’t include the homeless, who don’t just live in cities. I can’t walk a ridge on state or federal lands without running into a new encampment.

The presence of more people in forests adds to the risk of giant wildfires at a dangerous time. The drought has dried up waterways and turned brush and trees into kindling. And the death of millions of trees there has made some familiar landscapes almost unrecognizable. The erosion is extreme in many wild places, including Bluff Creek, where that video of me was shot nearly 50 years ago.

I find these intrusions on my wild existence so depressing that lately I’ve been spending more time intruding on your cities, particularly in settings where I fit in. In the hipster havens of San Francisco and Los Angeles, men are so allergic to shaving these days that if I wear a beanie hat, skinny jeans and custom-made sneakers, no one pays me any attention.

My urban forays have led me to wonder if the incursions into my once-quiet wilderness are my own fault. Californians used to be scared of the woods and wild things like me. I showed up in horror films. “In the 70s, Bigfoot was frigging terrifying—he was a monster who killed people,” says my friend Bobby Green, designer-owner of the Bigfoot Lodges in Culver City and Atwater Village in Los Angeles.

But then a more accessible, even cuddly me started appearing in cartoons, funny commercials, and comedies like John Lithgow’s “Harry and the Hendersons”. And so I’ve become a cousin to Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Compared to the more visceral mythology of video games or Pokémon Go, I worry I’m passé.

Michael Rugg, who runs the Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton has written that we seek Bigfoot at three levels. At the level of myth. At the level of biology, as we look to confirm reports of the living thing out there. And at the level of the paranormal, in our search for things that that we’re not yet capable of seeing.

That third, paranormal level can be the hardest to take seriously, but it may be the most important. One thing that has always motivated my roaming is the knowledge that I help people recognize that the most important things in our world may be those things that we can’t quite understand. And so we must hold to a healthy fear that keeps us from treading too heavily where we do not belong.

I used to create that fear. I used to be scary; but these days, not so much. Now I run scared.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.




Letter: Government needs to stop geoengineering

To the president of the United States, Sens. Reid, Feinstein, Boxer and Gov. Brown,

Welcome to Lake Tahoe on this occasion of the Tahoe Summit. As you gather to consider matters related to the precious unique natural environment here, I ask you to speak to what we know is harming all of life; geoengineering and climate modification.

Living here so close to nature we are all experiencing and witnessing an ill advised response to climate change, gone very wrong. The word is out and people know what is being rained down on them from the stratospheric aerosal injection (SAI) and related climate engineerinig activities, which CIA Director Brennan spoke about last month. We have been seeing this ongoing for years in the form of the spraying of the skies that we are so close to here at Tahoe. The noise of drones and air tankers is constant even in the middle of the wilderness.

The environment here is in critical condition and the experiment has to stop right now if we and all lifeforms have any chance of recovering. Let the earth seek equilibrium under its own natural forces that never should have been manipulated to begin with. Spraying the chemical equivalent of coal fly ash into the atmosphere has proven unsuccessful and all life on earth is suffering as a result of science hijacking by a few in power like David Keith and Ken Caldeira. This is omnicide and the moral imperative is to stop it immediately.

The evidence is overwhelming and the facts are clear and are found in the 60 notice to stop geoengineering filed a month ago by the all pro bono Legal Alliance To Stop Geoengineering. The eyes of history are upon you as you face the most critical issue of our time.

Sincerely,

Linda Witters, Upper Lake Valley




Letter: United effort to help Lake Tahoe

To the community,

We welcome President Obama to Lake Tahoe, which is admired for its great depth and clarity and beautiful alpine surroundings. As Tahoe’s public water agencies, we are hard at work on a water infrastructure initiative to enhance critical preparedness needs and hazard mitigation in the wildland urban interface against the threat of catastrophic wildfire.

Our bi-state Lake Tahoe Community Fire Protection Partnership is an extraordinary collaboration between public water agencies and the U.S. Forest Service. The efforts of the partnership align with the objectives of the Lake Tahoe Restoration Act to address forest health, storm water management, invasive species management, and native fish recovery. Since 2009, the partnership has installed more than 16 miles of improved water line with 180 fire hydrants every 500 lineal feet, 10 water storage tanks with a 4.7 million-gallon storage capacity, five booster pump stations to increase water flow, and strategically placed emergency generators to provide continued water supply during catastrophic events.

This local-federal effort to enhance water infrastructure specifically to reduce the impact of wildfire is in effect an insurance policy to protect the investment from the public and private sectors since that first Tahoe Summit in 1997.  As Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has expressed, a catastrophic fire here – and the subsequent impact on the lake from ash, debris and sedimentation – could set efforts back years.

We join our partners here – federal, state, local, and private – in renewing their commitment to this great lake and support the passage of a comprehensive Lake Tahoe Restoration Act.

Randy Vogelgesang, South Tahoe Public Utility District board president




Opinion: Trying to be American and Indian

By Rosalyn Eves

For the first few years of her life, Sarah Winnemucca, who was born around 1844, did not know that she was American. Born Thocmetony (Shell Flower) among the Numa (known among whites as the Northern Paiute or “digger” Indians), she roamed with her people over western Nevada and eastern Oregon, gathering plants and fish from local lakes. But even during her early years, Winnemucca had learned to be afraid of the men with “white” (blue) eyes, who looked like owls because of their beards.

For Winnemucca, being “American” was a complicated process of adopting the behaviors and language of people she had reason to distrust. Translating between the two cultures became her life’s work. And though she was uncomfortable with the role, her influence is still felt today: Winnemucca’s autobiography, “Life Among the Paiutes”, the first English narrative by a Native American woman, voices a thoughtful critique of Anglo-American culture while recounting the fraught legacy of federal lands, including Nevada’s Pyramid Lake and Oregon’s Malheur region, recently the site of a militia takeover. (The 19th-century Malheur Indian reservation lies immediately north of the current wetlands).

As Winnemucca grew up, she came to understand that the settlers were not leaving and she began adopting Anglo-American habits, acquiring the Christian name Sarah and mastering English and Spanish. At her grandfather’s request, she and her sister went to a convent school in San Jose, but they were only there a few weeks when “complaints were made to the sisters by wealthy parents about Indians being in school with their children.”

For most of her life, she sought to straddle American and Native cultures to help the Northern Paiutes. In 1859, land was set aside near Pyramid Lake for a reservation. Winnemucca and her family were expected to abandon their nomadic life for a settled “American” lifestyle—and make a success of farming in a dry, arid landscape without any training. Many Paiutes died of starvation at Pyramid Lake. They were only given supplies the first year, with government agents pocketing the money intended for them for the following 22 years (a practice common on many reservations).

After the first disastrous winter there, Winnemucca was driven to action, begging military leaders at Nevada’s Camp McDermit for help. Wagonloads of supplies were finally sent to the reservation. Winnemucca was hired as a military interpreter and her father and their band moved to the military camp.

Translating was a means for Winnemucca to get better treatment for her people, but she was often in an untenable position. In the mid-1870s she had to translate for Agent William V. Rinehart, whom she found to be a hard, unlikeable man. If she translated Rinehart’s words without comment, she failed to protect her people; but if she tried to convey grievances from the Northern Paiutes, she might be (and was) fired from her position. Rinehart eventually banned her from Malheur.

Winnemucca fared better in the military camps, where her knowledge of Paiute life garnered some respect. In 1878, she worked as a messenger, scout, and interpreter for General O.O. Howard during the Bannock War, a skirmish between the U.S. military and the Bannock Indians.

“This was the hardest work I ever did for the government in all my life … having been in the saddle night and day; distance, about two hundred and twenty-three miles. Yes, I went for the government when the officers could not get an Indian man or a white man to go for love or money. I, only an Indian woman, went and saved my father and his people,” she later wrote. Her courageous actions landed her on the front page of the New York Times in June 1878, but sowed mistrust between her and local tribes.

The Bannock War ended badly for the Paiutes, who were mostly innocent bystanders. In 1879, military leaders forced the Paiutes who had taken refuge from Malheur at Camp McDermit to march more than 350 miles in winter to the Yakama reservation in Washington territory.  Winnemucca was devastated; she had promised the Paiutes they would be all right if they followed military orders. In Yakama she worked as an interpreter. She argued with the reservation agent, wrote letters to military and government leaders, and in the winter of 1880, accompanied her father and other Paiute leaders to Washington, D.C., to meet with the secretary of the interior, Charles Schurz. They succeeded in obtaining a letter allowing the Paiutes to return to Malheur, but the Yakama agent refused to let them leave.

Several of the Paiutes accused Winnemucca of betraying them for money. She showed them Schurz’s letter and said, “I have said everything I could in your behalf … I have suffered everything but death to come here with this paper. I don’t know whether it speaks truth or not. You can say what you like about me. You have a right to say I have sold you. It looks so. I have told you many things which are not my own words, but the words of the agents and the soldiers … I have never told you my own words; they were the words of the white people, not mine.”

Winnemucca escalated her fight for reform. When face-to-face petitions and letters failed to improve conditions for the Paiutes, she began lecturing in San Francisco, dramatizing the plight of reservation Indians. These performances offered a carefully curated version of the “Indian princess” to various white crowds, and she often wore native dress. She told a reporter, “I would be the first Indian woman who ever spoke before white people, and they don’t know what the Indians have got to stand sometimes.” She described the abuses of reservation agents, particularly Rinehart. But her voice came at high cost: Rinehart responded by calling Winnemucca—in public and in letters to the Office of Indian Affairs—a drunk, a gambler, and a whore.

Winnemucca became famous. In 1883, sisters Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Mary Peabody Mann, important educators, intellectuals, and members of the Transcendentalist movement, invited her to lecture in New England. The Peabody sisters also arranged for the publication of “Life Among the Paiutes” later that year. In all, Winnemucca spoke nearly 300 times throughout New England, meeting John Greenleaf Whittier, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Sen. Henry Dawes, among others.

“The lecture was unlike anything ever before heard in the civilized world—eloquent, pathetic, tragical at times; at others [her] quaint anecdotes, sarcasms, and wonderful mimicry surprised the audience again and again into bursts of laughter and rounds of applause,” wrote a reporter from the Daily Silver State in 1879.

But despite her successful speaking, Sarah was not always as conformable as her audiences would like, and her writing about Americans often criticized their hypocrisy and challenged popular narratives about pioneers. Of the infamous Donner Party, who showed up when she was 5, Winnemucca wrote, “Well, while we were in the mountains hiding, the people that my grandfather called our white brothers came along to where our winter supplies were. They set everything we had left on fire. It was a fearful sight. It was all we had for the winter, and it was all burned during that night.” Even more cutting, she reflected in her autobiography, “Since the war of 1860 there have been one hundred and three (103) of my people murdered, and our reservation taken from us; and yet we, who are called blood-seeking savages, are keeping our promises to the government. Oh, my dear good Christian people, how long are you going to stand by and see us suffer at your hands?”

After the mid-1880s she abandoned lecturing, exhausted and disillusioned. In 1885 she told the Daily Silver State that she had fought “agents for the general good of [her] race, but as recent events have shown that they are not disposed to stand by me in the fight, I shall relinquish it.” She worked in both worlds, but was at home, ultimately, in neither. She once told an interviewer, “I would rather be with my people, but not to live with them as they live.”

She turned her energies instead toward a school for Paiute children, teaching children to read and write in English and providing them with training in marketable skills. Unfortunately, funding for the school was a persistent problem, and in 1887, the Dawes Act mandated that Native children be taught in white-run, English-only schools. And so the school was closed.

Winnemucca may have begun her life ignorant of Americans, but by the time she died in 1891, Americans were not ignorant of her—her obituary ran in the New York Times. And if her speeches and writing did not make the changes she hoped for, they remain a vivid, eloquent testimony of a life spent speaking for others.

Rosalyn Eves wrote her doctorate dissertation on 19th-century women’s rhetoric in the American West, including Sarah Winnemucca. She teaches at Southern Utah University and her first novel is forthcoming from Knopf in 2017.