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November 26-December 2, 2004 • Vol. 13 No. 47 • www.madtimes.com • Free

Traffic Safety Summit targets Latinos

By Laura Salinger

Car crashes are currently the leading cause of death for Latinos age 1-34 and one of the leading causes of death among young African Americans. Law-enforcement agencies and Dane County community groups are working on initiatives to get these groups to buckle up.

The Safe Community Coalition, a local public-private coalition of over 300 member organizations working to reduce injuries and injury-related costs in the community, recently held two traffic safety summits, one aimed at the African American community and the other at the Latino community. The Latino Traffic Safety Summit brought together leaders in the Latino community who brainstormed effective ways to increase traffic safety and decrease traffic fatalities.

"The lack of safety-belt use in the Latino and African American communities is considered a national health crisis," project director for the Rural Safety Belts initiative Donna Van Bogaert said. "We need to do something to save our youth in this community."

In 2002, Dane County led the state in traffic-crash fatalities. Young people are particularly at risk. Though they make up only 6 percent of licensed drivers in Wisconsin, they account for 16 percent of all crashes. During 2002, 1 in 7 teens was involved in a traffic accident.

The statistics on traffic safety for the Latino community are also staggering. According to the Safe Community Coalition, Hispanic and Black male teen-agers travel fewer miles than their White counterparts but are twice as likely to die in a motor-vehicle crash. Hispanic drivers have lower seat-belt-use rates than Whites and correspondingly higher fatality rates in traffic accidents.

"The most troubling statistic is one that affects Latino children," Centro Hispano Executive Director Peter Muñoz said. "Latino children ages 5 to 12 are 72 percent more likely to die from a traffic crash than White children."

As the Latino population continues to grow rapidly, community leaders find it more important than ever to make driving safer for them. The summit is one of many initiatives that will be part of a three-year grant program to increase safety-belt use in Dane County. The Safe Community Coalition and Dane County received one of only four National Highway Traffic Safety Administration grants aimed toward improving safety-belt use among rural youth and in the Latino and African American communities.

The Latino summit featured a number of speakers who discussed traffic safety with 40 to 50 participants. Safe Community Coalition Executive Director Cheryl Wittke, Safe Community Coalition board member from the Madison Police Department Lt. Stephanie Bradley Wilson, and Lt. Col. Ben Mendez opened the summit. Det. Dave Long spoke about traffic safety and how air bags can save lives. Madison Police Chief Noble Wray addressed the department’s racial profiling policies, and Madison Police Department acting Assistant Chief Luis Yudice gave the keynote address. Yudice is the author of an immigration policy which states that the Madison Police Department will not enforce immigration laws. In other words, Madison police will not arrest individuals simply because they suspect they are undocumented.

Participants then joined facilitated focus groups to brainstorm ways to increase safety-belt usage and safer driving among Dane County’s Latinos. The groups developed action items which will form the basis of community traffic-safety grant proposals.

One of the key findings of the focus groups was the neccesity of building trust between the Latino community and law-enforcement agencies.

"Law enforcement can’t do effective work if it doesn’t have that trust in the community," Muñoz said.

Noble Wray, Madison’s new police chief, is working toward what he calls "trust-based policing.” He hopes to improve relationships between minority communities and the department.

"We don’t racial[ly] profile," Lt. Gloria Ben-Ami said. "It is something as a department that we do not do. Once we do outreach and educate the community, I think that [perception of racial profiling] will improve."

Participants agreed that outreach and education are key to getting more Latinos to buckle up. Centro Hispano is currently working with Friends in Blue to create a program of driver education for the Latino community. The program would promote driver safety and seat-belt use while helping Latinos obtain driver’s licenses.

"Statistics show that if we educate the Latino community, they respond positively," Muñoz said. "[We will be] partnering with police agencies to provide a good vehicle to educate Latinos."

The Safe Community Coalition’s goal is to bring together leaders from the African American and Latino communities, law enforcement, faith communities, and social service providers to increase awareness and seat-belt usage. After all, it really comes down to a matter of life or death.

"We want to save lives," Lt. Bradley Wilson said. "If you are not buckled up, you have a reduced chance of surviving a crash."

The Lac du Flambeau Elders speak

World war to the boat landing wars

by Jonathan Gramling

Part 2 of 3

On November 5, The Madison Times sat down and interviewed several elder members of the Lac du Flambeau Band of the Lake Superior Ojibwe. Through their eyes and some supplemental research, we will tell the story of the Lac du Flambeau people through a three-part story, which will continue during Native American Heritage Month.

In Verdain Familout's recollection, life on the Lac du Flambeau reservation was relatively peaceful during her childhood. It was relatively isolated and life had a certain rhythm to it. "In the wintertime, you wouldn't ever see White people, except for the ones who lived here," Familout, an Ojibwe elder, reflected. "Then, in the summer, the White people would come and it would be exciting because there would be a lot of people around. It was very quiet and very peaceful. People just got along and nobody ever knew they were poor. You felt safe."

Then, World War II came along and life on the reservation would be forever changed. It began to become more connected to the mainstream economy. "When World War II started, things began to change on the reservation," observed Mike Chosa, another elder. "Money became more important than other material things like game and fish. The community started to grow or enlarge a little bit. By 1945, Ray Simpson started Simpson Electric Company up here. We had a plant here and he hired a few Indians. In those days, they hired more Indians than non-Indians. We had a workforce of about 80 people and maybe 60 of them were Indians."

In the period after World War II, the federal government instituted two programs that on their surface were intended to make life better for the Lac du Flambeau, but actually made things worse for many members of the tribe. The first was designed to improve employment possibilities for members of the tribe. By the early 1950s, the federal government instituted a voluntary relocation program to move members of the tribe to urban areas in order for them to find work.

According to Chosa, the effort was half-hearted and resulted in the destruction of many of the families who moved. "They gave people relocation monies to get down to the city," Chosa said. "It looked good to tribal members here who didn't have employment. They said 'We're going to give you $300 and we're going to give you $200 to move. And we're going to set you up in an apartment down there and we're going to get you a job.' The job was usually what they call a sweatshop that produced cheap clothing. They weren't even paying minimum wage. Remember, the people who lived here had their own homes and were able to go out in the woods and get what they wanted to survive. In the relocation program, they never taught them that they had to pay the rent and how to pay the utility bill and how to save for bus fare. They didn't learn they had to pay for their own house in the city. They weren't used to those things because in the city, nothing was provided for them. They were on their own. Those training programs never took that in account. So, when they failed financially, the bureau abandoned them and told them they couldn't help them anymore and they were stuck in the cities. They ended up living in the slums and we had to work harder to survive in the cities. We have a lot of those families - what remains of them - start coming back to the reservation."

In the 1960s, the federal government decided to help improve the housing stock on the Lac du Flambeau reservation. The law of unintended consequences kicked in. "They would tear down or wreck people's homes, just wipe them out, and put up a HUD home," Chosa said about the federal government's efforts. "Now, you had rent to pay. You didn't own your own home anymore. They also had restrictions on the housing where you couldn't have any of your extended family living with you, just one family. That went away from our tribal traditions where we had a nuclear and an extended family and they could all live in the same area. It changed with the federal housing. You couldn't own your own home anymore and you had to pay rent to the housing authority. Evictions occurred. It was a tough price to pay. Today, it's improved a little bit because they have home ownership now. You still have to pay 15-20 years until you get your home free and clear. At the same time, you don't own it like people normally do. We could only sell it to the tribe or another tribal member. It isn't any good on the market. There is no collateral to owning your own home on the reservation. If your home is on taxable or fee land, then it's accepted as collateral."

For most of its history since it signed the original treaties in the 1800s ceding their land, but not their gathering rights, to the federal government, the Lac du Flambeau were dominated by their Euro-American neighbors. Reservation lands were lost through sales to non-tribal members. The gathering rights of the tribe had been taken away by state practice and non-observance of the treaty responsibilities. Even though the Lac du Flambeau had rights, they were pretty much ignored by the majority population.

"In the old days, the White people who lived here and had businesses here were tolerant of the Indian population," Chosa observed. "But when we won the court case in 1983 that gave us our gathering rights, the tolerance went out the window. They had huge protests at the landings. People right here on the reservation, White people who lived on the reservation, were down there throwing rocks and stones at us and were shooting at our boats. Then, we didn't have that tolerance anymore. It created a sharp division between the Whites and the non-Whites. It still exists today."

Next week: Spearfishing and casinos