My friend Brian Bull at Wisconsin Public Radio sent me a link to a story he recently produced on Native American mounds, some of which are burial mounds and others that are effigy mounds threatened by development nationwide.
Many of these mounts are hundreds, and possibly thousands, of years old. Some of these prehistoric cultures still are a mystery. But many Native Americans consider them sacred, while archaeologists and historians prize them as historic evidence of early native cultures.
The bad news is, development and desecration have destroyed many of these earthen monuments. Highways, streets, even someone's backyard shed, could be displacing a mound.
Here's a link to a story Brian filed for
Environment Report on the issue.
Click here to find mounds in your state.
Here is a site that needs updating but gives nice background on battles to preserve native burial sites. Even when bones are excavated, there is much disagreement about what to do with them, since tribes never expected the bones to be distributed and therefore
did not have a "reburial" ceremony. The disturbance of skeletal remains is a deeply spiritual issue among some Native Americans.
Development is one issue, but looters also threaten ancient sites. Last year,
The Arizona Republic said:
In the dead of night, looters are destroying the history of America, desecrating sacred Indian ruins.
An estimated 80 percent of the nation's ancient archaeological sites have been plundered or robbed by shovel-toting looters. Though some of the pillaging is done by amateurs who don't know any better, more serious damage is wrought by professionals who dig deep, sometimes even using backhoes.
The motive is money. Indian artifacts are coveted worldwide by collectors willing to pay for trophy pieces of the past. Fine antiquities are displayed in glass cases at mansions and museums. Lesser objects wind up on fireplace mantels or stored in garages.
Looters are just the first link in a chain that includes collectors, galleries, trade shows and Internet sites such as eBay. But stopping the black-market business is virtually impossible because of a lack of manpower for enforcement and loopholes in the law that make it hard to convict the few who get caught.
The result is a scientific and spiritual loss.
"They're changing history,"Vernelda Grant, a tribal archaeologist for the San Carlos Apaches, says as she stands amid 800-year-old ruins that have been transformed into a crater field. "They're killing us. They're killing the existence of who we are."
Fashion Bullies
The Wall Street Journal has a story about the fact that bullying, especially by and toward young girls, is on the rise. Clothing has a lot to do with it:
Guidance counselors and psychologists say, fashion
bullying is reaching a new level of intensity as more designers launch
collections targeted at kids.
As a result, an increasing number of school and
community programs focused on girl-on-girl bullying are addressing peer
pressure and the sizable role clothing plays in girls' identity. In
Pennsylvania, California, Maryland and several other states, for
instance, community groups and some schools have started Club or Camp
Ophelia, a pair of programs developed by Penn State professor and
author Cheryl Dellasega that teach girls relationship skills. A "Bully
Quiz" the girls take asks, "Have you stopped being friends with someone
because she wore clothes you didn't like?"
Dorothy Espelage, a professor of educational
psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who has
studied teenage behavior for 14 years, says she has seen an increase in
"bullying related to clothes." She attributes that to the proliferation
of designer brands and the display of labels in ads. In the more than
20 states where she has studied teens, she has been surprised by how
kids revere those they perceive to have the best clothes. Having access
to designer clothing affords some kids "the opportunity to become
popular -- and that protects you and gives you social power and
leverage over others," she says.
Al's Morning Multimedia: Documenting School Crossing Safety
WAKR, an Akron, Ohio, radio station, and its Web site,
AkronNewsNow, is running
an impressively planned School Safety Project. The project was born out of a painful story of a death at a school crosswalk. The Web site set out to document every school crossing in the city, using photographs and government data. The project involves the radio station, its sister stations and its Web site. It includes a searchable school intersection database and video.
It is fairly rare, I think, for a commercial radio station to have such a substantial Web presence, but my old friend Ed Esposito, vice president for
Rubber City Radio Group, says his audience has been eager for this project. Here is an e-mail interview I did with him:
Q. What was the goal of this project? How did it start? A. Our goal was to raise awareness of school-zone safety issues and examine how successful the city was in responding to the 2005 death of 10-year-old Tony Swain, killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking to school. Tony’s selfless action in pushing his 6-year old sister away from the onrushing auto inspired city leaders to make school intersection safety a major initiative, and we wanted to measure their progress. This also gave us our first taste of building an interactive database from scratch, targeting specific issues and content in connection with a news report or series.
Q. How did you do this work, documenting every school-crossing in Akron? A. Our team leaders, Tiffany Ciesicki and Colin Morris, personally performed on-site inspections and walk-throughs of every elementary and middle school intersection in the Akron Public School district. This was not an easy task, since Akron is in the process of an ambitious school rebuilding program -- turning schools into multi-use, neighborhood “Community Learning Centers” to leverage state and local school construction funds -- and since six elementary schools were rotating classes in temporary facilities while buildings were being renovated or rebuilt entirely.
In addition to building our database of findings documenting crosswalk treatment (street painting), flashing zone warning signs, updated school and pedestrian warning and speed limit signs, we also took into consideration the city’s use of robotic cameras used to catch speeders in school zones. This controversial program fining offenders with civil rather than criminal penalties was a direct response to the Swain hit-and-run death, and is currently awaiting an Ohio Supreme Court ruling on whether it is constitutional.
Q. As a radio station group, how important is the Web to you? A. It is the future, no doubt about it. We consider our three station-affiliated sites and our cornerstone news portal, www.akronnewsnow.com, key to our growth and ability to serve the community. The addition of AkronNewsNow provides us with a fourth “radio station” and also puts us in the “TV” and “print” business by expanding our ability to provide deeper content of interest to our community.
Q.What has the public response been to this project? A. The statistics were impressive. We started
part one of our five-part series on Monday, Oct. 22, and it quickly became our most-viewed story with five times the normal traffic for a local story. Parts
two and
three have continued in that trend, although at a slightly lower ratio. Feedback from stakeholders (school officials, parents and city officials) has been positive.
Q. How did you use your radio programming to augment what you did online? A. WAKR-AM featured our reporting in a 15-part series airing during morning drive Monday through Friday. (We used a strip series rotation of three parts daily, with a 530 a.m./7 a.m., 6 a.m./7:30 a.m. and 6:30 a.m./8 a.m. rotation) highlighting central elements of that particular day’s report and driving listeners to the Web site so they could watch or listen to full interviews (video and audio) as well as access our interactive database. We also featured highlights on our FM station newscasts (WONE-FM and WQMX-FM, morning drive) in mid-week, and supported the series with promotional inventory. On completion of our series, all five parts will be posted to a special section on our Web site, where we will also be able to update story treatments with additional angles and keep all of our reports easily accessible and searchable.
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's Note: Al's Morning
Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other
materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and
analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it
will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The
column is fact-checked, but depends on the accuracy and integrity of
the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be
corrected.
A story in the Mankato Free Press talked about a...
