Word: bruno
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ruby Withrow remembers the happy days she spent as a young child on her grandfather Moses Bruno's 80-acre homestead near Shawnee, Okla. There the extended Bruno family, members of the Potawatomi tribe, tended large gardens of vegetables and fruits and raised chickens, hogs and cows. On Sundays the whole family attended the Sacred Heart Catholic Mission just down the road. But all that changed soon after oil was discovered on the Bruno property...
Lease agreements were arranged with oil producers, wells were dug, and pumping began in 1939. But family members say Grandpa Bruno never knew how much oil and gas were being taken out of his land or how much money he was due from their sale. All his royalty payments went into a trust fund managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). If Bruno needed to buy something, he had to appeal to the local BIA agent, and he was rarely given cash. When he wanted to buy a cow, the price was deducted from his account and given directly...
...wells were plugged just 28 months later--Bruno family members say the wells' operator never gave a reason for ending production--but in that short time, they say, the soil was ruined, and the Brunos were able to grow hardly anything on it. Younger family members moved away to find jobs, and the old folks limped along on public assistance until 1960, when Bruno and his wife Frances died within a month of each other. Their heirs decided to sell what remained of the land the next year...
Such stories are common among Native Americans. Like legions of others, Bruno acquired his holdings under the Dawes Act of 1887. Its allotment program was an effort by Congress to break up the tribal structure by encouraging self-sufficiency among the Indians. The Dawes Act mandated that the land given to Natives be managed by the Department of the Interior's local BIA agent and promised that any profits from the property would be held in trust for its owners. The problem, say hundreds of families like the Brunos, is that the owners received relatively little of the money coming...
According to Bruno, the film studies concentration will be housed alongside VES in the Carpenter Center, whose designer, Le Corbusier, earned acclaim for integrating cinematic elements into his architecture...