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An article about blacks descended from slaves who now want membership in various Indian tribes.

Jim Crow and the Indians
"Freedmen," blacks whose ancestors were enslaved by Cherokee and other tribes, are suing to become tribal citizens. But the tribes say they are ineligible because they don't have Indian blood.

By Claudio Saunt

Feb. 21, 2006 | Last August in Tahlequah, Okla., Lucy Allen appeared before the Judicial Appeals Tribunal, a three-person court that hears constitutional questions in the Cherokee Nation. Allen is suing to become a Cherokee citizen. Born in Vinita, Okla., within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation, she is far from your typical Indian wannabe. She has nothing in common with the Virginia town-and-country crowd who claim descent from Pocahontas, nor does she subscribe to the Shaman's Drum or share sweat lodges with New Agers who seek enlightenment and Kokopelli souvenirs in the Southwest.

Allen, 73 years old, is descended from African slaves who for generations lived in the Cherokee Nation and labored for Cherokee masters. She is attempting to overturn a 1987 Cherokee law that makes the descendants of these slaves ineligible for Cherokee citizenship. Depending on the Tribunal's forthcoming decision, her case could reverse years of legalized discrimination against freedmen, as men and women descended from Indian-owned slaves are collectively known today. Allen v. Ummerteskee could become the Cherokee Nation's own Brown v. Board of Education

If Allen wins her case, the impact would be enormous. There are today about 250,000 Cherokee citizens, and by one conservative estimate, Allen v. Ummerteskee would overnight make 130,000 freedmen and their descendants eligible for citizenship. Although most of them long ago cut their ties to the Cherokee Nation, perhaps 38,000 interested persons could be expected to submit a citizenship application to the Cherokee registrar. A comparable situation in the United States would add 45 million citizens.

The potential impact on the tribal budget is less clear. Freedmen citizens would have access to healthcare through the Indian Health Service, tuition support for higher education, mortgage assistance, and other benefits. Most of these services are financed through the Cherokee Nation by the federal government on a need-based formula, so funding could be expected to rise accordingly. But fully 25 percent of the Cherokee national budget comes from other sources (gaming and other tribal enterprises), and this inelastic revenue would have to be shared by a larger population.

The neighboring Creek Nation also excludes its freedmen, and although a decision by Cherokee courts would have no legal consequences for the Creeks, it is difficult to imagine that they would not soon follow suit. So too might the Seminole Nation, which currently grants freedmen partial citizenship. And perhaps even the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, whose rejection of the freedmen is longer standing and more deeply rooted, would eventually yield to the trend. All told, well over 300,000 freedmen could be affected. What this amounts to is that the Five Tribes -- or Five Civilized Tribes, as the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws and Chickasaws were called in the 19th century -- face a social revolution as powerful as America's in the civil rights era.

Not surprisingly, freedmen are driving the movement. In the last few years, they have founded the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes as well as a rival organization, the Freedmen Descendants of the Five Civilized Tribes. They hold monthly and annual meetings, and they daily discuss affairs on AfriGeneas.com in the African-Native American forum. One man, Napoleon Davis, even built a shrine to his freedmen ancestors, a cavernous concrete and wood museum inspired by the shape of a tepee. It sits in a field, just off South 74th Street in Muskogee, Okla.

They have also filed lawsuits. In addition to Allen, Marilyn Vann, a Cherokee freedwoman, is suing the Department of the Interior in federal court for allowing the Cherokee Nation to disenfranchise her. And freedmen Ron Graham and Fred Johnson are suing the Creek Nation in tribal court.

Graham recalls the moment he decided to dedicate himself to the freedmen cause. Several years ago, when he tried to file for citizenship, the registrar for the Creek Nation told him, "Your father wasn't Indian. He wasn't nothing but a slave." "That hurt me until today," Graham remembers. "When she told me that, oh boy, I was hurt," he recalls. Sylvia Davis and others have undertaken similar initiatives against the Seminole Nation.

Slavery and its legacy lie at the heart of the current unrest, as the discussants on AfriGeneas.com reveal. One writer charges a historian and citizen of the Seminole Nation, Susan A. Miller, with "Afri-phobism." Another invokes the "sordid, racist history" of the Five Tribes. A third accuses the Cherokee Nation of sponsoring "Apartheid in America."

Their frustration and anger has its roots in the early 19th century, when the Five Tribes adopted race slavery as their own. Although some slaves toiled on sprawling plantations while their masters relaxed on distant verandas, many others labored alongside their owners. Living and working in close quarters, they inevitably became family, marrying Indians and fathering or bearing their children. Intermarriage blurred racial boundaries and sometimes made it difficult to separate family slaves from family members. By the outbreak of the Civil War, the proportion of slaves in these nations ranged from a low of 10 percent in the Creek Nation to a high of 18 percent in the Chickasaw Nation. Numbering as many as 10,000, these slaves were freed by treaty with the United States in 1866. The same treaties stipulated that the Cherokees, Creeks and Seminoles adopt their ex-slaves as citizens. (The Choctaw and Chickasaw treaties had escape clauses that Indians invoked to avoid naturalizing their freedmen.)

Following the war, racism was widespread in the Five Tribes but never inspired the level of violence found in the Southern states. In fact, in the Cherokee, Creek and Seminole nations, ex-slaves served as legislators, judges and emissaries until the turn of the century, when the United States violated its treaty obligations and unilaterally dissolved the governments of the Five Tribes. Not until the 1970s were these nations formally reconstituted.

At that point, they ignored the 1866 treaties and expelled freedmen from their nations. The particulars differ from tribe to tribe. The Creeks did so by passing a new constitution in 1979. Buddy Cox, a close relative of the principal chief at the time, Claude Cox, frankly recalls that the motives for the disenfranchisement were racist. "Claude Cox did not have as much Creek blood as I have," Chester Adams, an elderly freedman, complained to me in 2000.

The Cherokees did so by law in the 1980s, largely to ensure the election of Ross O. Swimmer, later a high-level Reagan and Bush I appointee and now a special trustee for American Indians in Bush II's Department of the Interior. "They're entitled to some benefits, but not to register to vote," Swimmer said in 1983. "They're not members of the tribe by blood." But Marilyn Vann, one of the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit against the Cherokees, argues that freedmen "paid their dues" by clearing fields and building houses for their masters. "Is this now the deal, now that they're no longer useful?" she asks. "It is repugnant to me."

The Seminoles took action in 2000, when it came time to distribute a $56 million payout from the federal government. They first tried to expel freedmen, and then, in 2003, after a failed fight with the Department of the Interior, denied them educational and social services. The 1866 treaties, says the Seminole scholar Susan A. Miller, were imposed by the United States and are "hardly ethical legal standards for us to be following."

Why are freedmen so interested in reclaiming their tribal citizenship? If you ask, they will say they want to recover what is theirs, to rectify an injustice. Few will speak about gaming money, healthcare or college scholarships, although these resources (scanty as they are in most tribes) surely drive some people, black and white, to pursue Indian citizenship.

Yet financial motivations are only a part of the story behind the freedmen lawsuits. Many freedmen have intensely personal motivations, rooted in memories of their parents and grandparents. They recall hearing their older relatives speak Cherokee, Creek or Seminole. Rudy Hutton, a Creek freedmen, remembered one such occasion when I met him a few years ago. During his father Pilot's final illness, Rudy drove him to the site of his childhood home in Huttonville, Okla., an all-black town that vanished long ago. Pilot began speaking Creek, although he always maintained he had forgotten the language. "Those SOBs at Okmulgee," Rudy says of the officers at the Creek capital, "they won't give you nothing unless you're a white guy."

Some older freedmen even remember attending stomp dances and Indian churches as small children. Even if now alienated from this part of their past, they know well that their families' roots are in the Cherokee, Creek or Seminole nations.

You do not have to dig too deeply to uncover these roots. I realized this in 1999, when I visited Henry Durant in Wetumka, Okla., a dusty crossroads of little more than 1,000 people about 70 miles due south of Tulsa. Durant, a former farm laborer and Negro League baseball player, then age 89, was raised by his grandfather, John Grayson. Grayson, who spoke Creek, was born a slave in the Creek Nation in 1852.

Depending on whom you ask, freedmen such as Hutton and Durant are either interlopers, with no real claim to tribal citizenship, or disowned kin, rejected because of the color of their skin. To liberal-minded Americans, the answer may appear obvious, but Indian officials say that the expulsion of freedmen isn't driven by racial bigotry. "It's not a matter of skin color, it's a matter of citizenship," said Mike Miller, a spokesman for the Cherokee Nation, during a disputed election in 2003. "If you don't have Indian blood, then you are not eligible for membership, regardless of what other ethnicity you may be."

But as it turns out, it is not so easy to determine who is an Indian. The Five Tribes rely on the Dawes rolls, a census produced by U.S. officials at the end of the 19th century. The census, named after Massachusetts Sen. Henry Dawes, is divided by tribe and further divided into Indians by blood and freedmen.

In theory, the by-blood rolls list Indians and others who had been adopted by the tribe, while the freedmen rolls list ex-slaves. With the exception of the Seminole Nation (which grants limited citizenship to freedmen), the Five Tribes restrict citizenship to individuals who have an ancestor on the Dawes by-blood rolls.

In many ways, these requirements for citizenship are generous, allowing thousands of people in California's sprawling suburbs and cul-de-sacs to file for citizenship even though some have only a single great-grandparent on the Dawes by-blood rolls. Other nations, by contrast, have a blood quantum requirement. You must be one-quarter Prairie Band Potawatomi to become a citizen of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, for example. A lone great-grandparent would not be enough to qualify.

Nevertheless, Lucy Allen, Marilyn Vann and thousands of others who can trace their ancestors to the Dawes freedmen rolls are out of luck, even if they are lifelong Oklahoma residents with closer ties to the Cherokee Nation than tribal citizens who live in other states. Today, one-third of the Cherokee Nation's 250,000 citizens live outside of Oklahoma. It is impossible to say how many freedmen live elsewhere, but when you travel Oklahoma's dirt and gravel roads, which partition the state into square-mile sections, you still encounter poor freedmen communities whose roots stretch back to the 19th century.

And at some traditional stomp dances, it is possible to find participants of various mixtures of Indian and African ancestry sharing the floor. Many people believe that freedmen have more connections to Africa than to the Five Tribes, Marilyn Vann observes, but they "know a lot more about a stomp dance, hog fry, and wild onion dinner than anything about Africa."

Critics of the current citizenship policy point out that it is foolish to tie citizenship to the Dawes by-blood rolls. Not only was there a good deal of marriage between Indians and their slaves, but confused U.S. officials sometimes distinguished between the two merely by skin color. The line of inquiry pursued by Dawes commissioners could be both comical and disturbing. When Liza Parker applied to the Creek Nation in 1902, they questioned a freedman about Parker's appearance:

Q. What is the color of Liza?

A. She -- there she is.

Q. What blood?

A. Well, she shows some mixed.

Q. Mixed with colored?

A. Yes sir.

Q. Right much so, isn't it?

A. Well --

Q. More colored than Indian, ain't it?

A. No sir; more Indian than it is colored, if I have the say so.

Her application was denied.

Genealogists have even uncovered instances of siblings appearing on different Dawes rolls. Today, their descendants are distinguished as Indians or freedmen merely because of the capricious decision of a government agent in 1900. Despite these inconsistencies, in Allen v. Ummerteskee, the Cherokee Nation stands by its policy of discrimination, arguing that it has sovereign immunity, that stare decisis should prevent the Judicial Appeals Tribunal from overturning established precedent, that as a sovereign nation it can define citizenship as it sees fit.

Advocates for freedmen counter that this legal position obscures a serious injustice: the Cherokee Nation appears to be perpetuating the badge of slavery and denying the right to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude," thereby violating both the 13th and 15th amendments. Surely, they argue, such egregious violations of dearly held principles cannot exist in the heart of the United States.

Cherokees reject this argument. The discrimination against Allen exists not in the United States but in the Cherokee Nation, they rightly observe, where the U.S. Constitution has no bearing, except when Congress says otherwise.

Congress, in fact, could remedy the situation using its plenary power, or absolute and exclusive authority, over Indian nations. Established in the 1880s when the United States openly aspired to be a colonial empire, plenary power is rooted in the belief that white Americans have a moral obligation to civilize the world's darker races. Despite its objectionable origins, some scholars suggest that since Congress used plenary power to establish the Dawes Commission in the first place, it ought to use the same power to fix the mess it created a century ago.

Indian nations defend their sovereignty fiercely, however, and are understandably wary of even the slightest intrusion. When a regional officer with the Bureau of Indian Affairs asked the Cherokee Nation to explain why it barred freedmen from participating in a 2003 election, Principal Chief Chad Smith fired off an angry letter. "In this age of self-determination and self governance," he wrote, "I am shocked to find the contents and tone of your letter to be both patronizing and very paternalistic." If Congress wields its plenary power to extend tribal citizenship to freedmen, it would represent a frontal assault on Indian sovereignty.

To mount such an assault in the name of civil rights, using powers inherited from the golden age of colonialism, would be inconsistent, if not downright dishonest. History suggests that it would be safer to bet on the latter. When Congress broke up the Cherokees' communally owned land in the 1890s and distributed tracts to individual Cherokee citizens -- the better to teach them the value of private property -- freedmen received a share of the national domain along with everyone else. Because the land belonged to Indians, Congress was happy to offer freedmen the proverbial "forty acres and a mule"; it proved less generous when the land in question was owned by whites. Given this history, what right does Congress have to demand more of Indians today?

Moreover, by pitting African-Americans against Indians, Congress might even be accused of the bureaucratic equivalent of arming blacks to march against Indian towns, as colonists and federal officials did in the 18th and 19th centuries. (Completing the circle, colonists then paid Indians to hunt down fugitive slaves.)

The solution to this dilemma perhaps rests within the Cherokee Nation itself. Cherokee activist David Cornsilk, who drafted Allen's legal briefs, recognizes that Cherokees have a history of enslaving and segregating people of African descent. Yet he looks not to the United States for redress but to the Cherokee Nation. In a series of carefully crafted arguments in favor of enfranchising freedmen, Cornsilk invokes Cherokee history, Cherokee common law and the Cherokee Constitution.

The Cherokee tribal attorney, in his defense of the status quo, compares the Cherokee Nation to the United States in the Jim Crow era. "Social, economic, and moral changes" might allow for an eventual rethinking of legal precedent, he admits. "One has only to look at the evil of slavery and segregation and eventual Court reversals of some of the earlier oppressive decisions concerning the treatments of African Americans in the United States Courts. However, those changes have been made over time as the United States as a government, courts, and as the people changed."

But further inaction, Cornsilk argues, will only perpetuate injustice. "The racists in the United States and the Cherokee Nation have relied upon the passage of time, not to soften their views or accept as equals their Freedmen brothers and sisters," he observes, "but have instead calcified their resistance, passed oppressive laws and girded their forces against the citizenship rights of the black Cherokees."

"The sins of our dark past continue to haunt us," Cornsilk concludes, "and it is time for the Cherokee people to take the path we were intended and do what is right."

In the meantime, freedmen and Indians anxiously await a decision on Allen v. Ummerteskee. The Tribunal has considered and rejected other freedmen petitions in the past. What the future holds is anyone's guess.

An article on evangelicals and global warming.

Christians' burning issue
Under pressure from right-wingers like James Dobson, America's largest evangelical group won't speak out on global warming. But some evangelicals are breaking ranks.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Feb. 09, 2006 | If you strive to love your neighbor as yourself, then God calls you to join the fight against global warming. That's the message that a group of 86 evangelical leaders, dubbed the Evangelical Climate Initiative, preached at a press conference in Washington Wednesday, quoting scripture and calling on Congress and the White House to pass national CO2-emission reductions.

But the spirited call to action took place without the blessing of the largest evangelical group in the country, the National Association of Evangelicals, whose members represent 30 million of the faithful. Powerful, politically connected evangelical leaders like James Dobson of Focus on the Family prefer not to take a stance on global warming and had requested that the association follow their lead.

The schism among evangelicals reflects political tensions in their relationship to the White House. Some who side with the Bush administration's do-nothing policies on global warming even pressured sympathetic evangelical leaders not to speak out, in a strategy that mirrors the one the White House has used to stifle science it disagrees with. So the splinter group of principled preachers is striking out on its own, taking on the biggest environmental threat God's creation has ever seen.

Declaring that human-induced climate change is real, and that its likely impact on the world's poor requires Christians to take action, the statement was signed by dozens of pastors, including the author of "The Purpose-Driven Life," Rev. Rick Warren, as well as Christian college presidents and Christian relief organization directors.

Among their ranks is Duane Litfin, president of Wheaton College (whose most famous alum is Billy Graham). Litfin says that the people who will suffer most from climate change will be the poor, vulnerable and marginalized, as their sources of water, air and food production are threatened.

"What is required of a Christian when you see those kinds of issues on the table?" he implored at Wednesday's press conference. "We have a major set of convictions about coming alongside a neighbor who is in desperate need. This isn't someone else's issue. This is our issue. Can we please step up?"

Todd Bassett, who serves as national commander of the Salvation Army, warned of the rise of national disasters around the world, recalling his recent visit to 10,000 families in Florida, who have been living in FEMA trailers for the last year and a half. And Leith Anderson, former president of the National Association of Evangelicals and a pastor in Minnesota, quoted St. Peter and declared: "Those 86 of us who have signed this statement and others as well, we're doing what is right, and we're not afraid."

Fearlessly disregarding the wishes of message-makers like Dobson is a bold gesture, and the ECI signatories don't intend to hide their light under a bushel: They're running print ads in the New York Times, Roll Call and Christianity Today, as well as TV ads on Fox News and ABC Family, aiming to educate the evangelical flock about the threat of global warming to God's creation and inspire them to action. The signatories will spend the coming year preaching about the dangers of climate change at Christian universities and in their own churches. And in November, the group will meet with businesses, including coal-burning utilities, to discuss strategies for reducing emissions.

Enviro-minded evangelicals say the campaign is the first step toward reaching skeptical Christians. "The statement is groundbreaking. It lays a foundation in our community for building a consensus on global warming," said the Rev. Jim Ball, the executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network, best-known for its "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign.

Still, while climatologists have reached consensus on global warming, it's clear that evangelical Christians have not -- at least not yet. There were two important names not on the list of luminaries signing on to the ECI statement: National Association of Evangelicals president Ted Haggard and vice president of governmental affairs Richard Cizik. Despite the fact that both men personally agree with the ECI's tenets and goals, Haggard and Cizik did not sign the declaration for fear that the NAE would be seen as endorsing it.

In June of 2004, Haggard and Cizik indicated their commitment to what Christians call "creation care" issues by signing the Sandy Cove Covenant, a declaration of intent to create a consensus statement on human-induced climate change among evangelicals. But since then, climate skeptics within the NAE have clamped down.

Last month, the NAE came under pressure not to take a position on global warming from its most conservative members, including James Dobson and Oral Roberts University president Richard Roberts. The Interfaith Stewardship Alliance sent a letter signed by Dobson, Roberts and 20 others leaders declaring that "We are evangelicals, and we care about God's creation. However, we believe there should be room for Bible-believing evangelicals to disagree about the cause, severity and solutions to the global warming issue."

Calvin Beisner, an associate professor of historical theology and social ethics at Knox Theological Seminary, who was one of the signers and authors of that letter, says that many evangelicals continue to have serious doubts about global warming. "Such a policy of mandatory CO2 emissions reductions as a means of combating global warming rests on three major assumptions, all of which we think are debatable, if not downright false," he said.

The assumptions that Beisner sees as debatable are that global warming will have catastrophic effects, human emissions of CO2 are a large enough part of the problem that reducing them could significantly reduce global warming, and mandatory emission reductions would have more beneficial than harmful effects on the global environment and human economy.

However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's leading scientific body on global warming, which includes evangelical Sir John Houghton, doesn't view the points as debatable at all.

Calvin B. Dewitt, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is also evangelical, compared the silencing of Rev. Richard Cizik on climate change to the recent muzzling of Dr. James Hansen at NASA. "Here is a person who has not changed [his position], he is just being silenced. People are asking what kind of truth-seeking this is, when a person who is a principal leader in bringing an awareness of climate change to the whole evangelical world -- what is going on that's compelling the NAE executive committee to say you cannot speak for us?" Dewitt predicted that the tactic would backfire on the NAE, since evangelicals have an ideological distaste for church hierarchy, dating back to the Reformation: "It's raising the issue even higher than it was before."

And in spite of scientific skepticism from evangelical leaders, many in the community seem well aware of the issue. The Evangelical Climate Initiative cites a poll that the group commissioned of 1,000 evangelicals, which found that two-thirds believe global warming is taking place, and seven out of 10 believe global climate change will pose a serious threat to future generations.

Melanie Griffin, director of environmental partnerships for the Sierra Club, who is an elder in her evangelical church in Spencerville, Md., says that she believes the grass roots are in fact ahead of their national leadership on climate change: "I think it's growing pains. It seems to be what is going on." She says that after spending a decade working on environmental issues with church groups, she's seen an explosion of interest from local congregations and youth groups in the last two years. "The local churches and individual evangelicals are getting really engaged in creation care, and some of the national spokespeople are coming on a little more slowly."

Sally Bingham, an Episcopal priest who is the environmental minister at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, is not surprised that evangelicals have not yet come to a consensus on global warming. Bingham, who runs a religious effort on global warming in 17 states called the Regeneration Project, says that evangelical children are taught not to trust scientists as soon as they enter Sunday school, starting with resisting the theory of evolution: "Why would evangelicals believe what the scientific community is saying now about global warming when they were raised as children to be suspicious of science?" But she believes that the evangelicals who do believe in global warming and are committed to doing something about it will ultimately prevail: "I believe that the evangelicals will move forward on a consensus on climate change. I don't think that the voices that understand the science are going to go away. Eventually, the scientific evidence will be so overpowering the evangelicals will come onboard."

Why ice is slippery.

Explaining Ice: The Answers Are Slippery
By KENNETH CHANG

Here is one question that probably won't cross the minds of Sasha Cohen, Irina Slutskaya and the other Olympic women figure skaters today, even if they fall: Why is ice slippery?

But maybe it should. After all, ice is a solid, and trying to glide on thin metal blades across the surfaces of most solids — concrete, wood, glass, to name a few — results in ear-piercing sounds and ungraceful stumbles. Though the question may seem to be a simple one, physicists are still searching for a simple answer.

The explanation once commonly dispensed in textbooks turns out to be wrong. And slipperiness is just one of the unanswered puzzles about ice. Besides the everyday ice that you slip on, there are about a dozen other forms, some of which experts suspect exist in the hot interior of Earth or on the surface of Pluto. Scientists expect to discover still more variations in the coming years.

Ice, said Robert M. Rosenberg, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., and a visiting scholar at Northwestern University, "is a very mysterious solid."

Dr. Rosenberg wrote an article looking at the slipperiness of ice in the December issue of Physics Today, because he kept coming across the wrong explanation for it, one that dates back more than a century.

This explanation takes advantage of an unusual property of water: the solid form, ice, is less dense than the liquid form. That is why ice floats on water, while a cube of frozen alcohol — which has a freezing temperature of minus 173 degrees Fahrenheit — would plummet to the bottom of a glass of liquid alcohol. The lower density of ice also means that the melting temperature of ice can be lowered below the usual 32 degrees by squeezing on it.

According to the frequently cited — if incorrect — explanation of why ice is slippery under an ice skate, the pressure exerted along the blade lowers the melting temperature of the top layer of ice, the ice melts and the blade glides on a thin layer of water that refreezes to ice as soon as the blade passes.

"People will still say that when you ask them," Dr. Rosenberg said. "Textbooks are full of it."

But the explanation fails, he said, because the pressure-melting effect is small. A 150-pound person standing on ice wearing a pair of ice skates exerts a pressure of only 50 pounds per square inch on the ice. (A typical blade edge, which is not razor sharp, is about one-eighth of an inch wide and about 12 inches long, yielding a surface area of 1.5 square inches each or 3 square inches for two blades.) That amount of pressure lowers the melting temperature only a small amount, from 32 degrees to 31.97 degrees. Yet ice skaters can easily slip and fall at temperatures much colder.

The pressure-melting explanation also fails to explain why someone wearing flat-bottom shoes, with a much greater surface area that exerts even less pressure on the ice, can also slip on ice.

Two alternative explanations have arisen to take the pressure argument's place. One, now more widely accepted, invokes friction: the rubbing of a skate blade or a shoe bottom over ice, according to this view, heats the ice and melts it, creating a slippery layer.

The other, which emerged a decade ago, rests on the idea that perhaps the surface of ice is simply slippery. This argument holds that water molecules at the ice surface vibrate more, because there are no molecules above them to help hold them in place, and they thus remain an unfrozen liquid even at temperatures far below freezing.

Scientists continue to debate whether friction or the liquid layer plays the more important role. Dr. Rosenberg, asked his opinion, chose a indecisive answer: "I say there are two major reasons."

The notion that ice has an intrinsic liquid layer is not a new concept. It was first proposed by the physicist Michael Faraday in 1850 after a simple experiment: he pressed two cubes of ice against each other, and they fused together. Faraday argued that the liquid layers froze solid when they were no longer at the surface. Because the layer is so thin, however, it was hard for scientists to see.

In 1996, Gabor A. Somorjai, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, bombarded the surface of ice with electrons and watched how they bounced off, producing a pattern that looked at least partially liquid at temperatures down to minus 235 degrees. A couple of years later, a team of German scientists bounced helium atoms off ice and found results that corroborated the Lawrence Berkeley findings.

"The water layer is absolutely intrinsic to ice," Dr. Somorjai said.

The findings, he said, fit with a simple observation that suggests friction cannot be the one and only explanation of slipperiness. When a person stands on ice, he added, no heat is generated through friction, and yet "ice is still slippery."

But a colleague of Dr. Somorjai's at Lawrence Berkeley, Miquel Salmeron, while he does not dispute Dr. Somorjai's experiment, does dispute the importance of the intrinsic liquid layer to slipperiness.

In 2002, Dr. Salmeron and colleagues performed an experiment. They dragged the tip of an atomic force microscope, resembling a tiny phonograph needle, across the surface of ice.

"We found the friction of ice to be very high," Dr. Salmeron said. That is, ice is not really that slippery, after all.

Dr. Salmeron said that this finding indicates that while the top layer of ice may be liquid, it is too thin to contribute much to slipperiness except near the melting temperature. In his view, friction is the primary reason ice is slippery. (The microscope tip was so small that its friction melted only a tiny bit of water, which immediately refroze and therefore did not provide the usual lubrication, he said.)

Dr. Salmeron concedes, however, that he cannot definitively prove that his view is the correct one.

"It's amazing," he said. "We're in 2006, and we're still talking about this thing."

Ice formed by water behaves even more strangely at lower temperatures and higher pressures.

Water — H2O — seems to be a simple molecule: two hydrogen atoms connected to a central oxygen atom in a V-shape. In everyday ice, which scientists call Ice Ih, the water molecules line up in a hexagonal pattern; this is why snowflakes all have six-sided patterns. (The "h" stands for hexagonal. A variation called Ice Ic, found in ice crystals floating high up in the atmosphere, forms cubic crystals.)

The crystal structure of the ice is fairly loose — the reason that Ice Ih is less dense than liquid water — and the bonds that the hydrogen atoms form between water molecules, called hydrogen bonds, are weaker than most atomic bonds.

At higher pressures, the usual hexagonal structure breaks down, and the bonds rearrange themselves in more compact, denser crystal structures, neatly labeled with Roman numerals: Ice II, Ice III, Ice IV and so on. Scientists have also discovered several forms of ice in which the water molecules are arranged randomly, as in glass.

At a pressure of about 30,000 pounds per square inch, Ice Ih turns into a different type of crystalline ice, Ice II. Ice II does not occur naturally on Earth. Even at the bottom of the thickest portions of the Antarctic ice cap, the weight of three miles of ice pushes down at only one-quarter of the pressure necessary to make Ice II. But planetary scientists expect that Ice II, and possibly some other variations, like Ice VI, exist inside icier bodies in the outer solar system, like the Jupiter moons Ganymede and Callisto.

With pressure high enough, the temperature need not even be cold for ice to form. Several Februaries ago, Alexandra Navrotsky, a professor of chemistry, materials science and geology at the University of California, Davis, was visiting Northwestern. She was sitting in office of Craig R. Bina, a geophysicist, and looking out over frozen Lake Michigan. "Ice might have been on our minds," she recalled.

The scientists started considering what happens to tectonic plates after they are pushed back down into Earth's interior. At about 100 miles down, the temperature of these descending plates is 300 to 400 degrees — well above the boiling point of water at the surface — but cool compared with that of surrounding rocks. The pressure of 700,000 pounds per square inch at this depth, Dr. Bina and Dr. Navrotsky calculated, could be great enough to transform any water that was there into a solid phase known as Ice VII.

No one knows whether ice can be found inside Earth, because no one has yet figured out a way to look 100 miles underground. Just as salt melts ice at the surface, other molecules mixing with the water could impede the freezing that Dr. Bina and Dr. Navrotsky have predicted.

Ice also changes form with dropping temperatures. In hexagonal ice, the usual form, the oxygen atoms are fixed in position, but the hydrogen bonds between water molecules are continually breaking and reattaching, tens of thousands of times a second.

At temperatures cold enough — below minus 330 degrees — the hydrogen bonds freeze as well, and normal ice starts changing into Ice XI.

William B. McKinnon, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, said that astronomers were probably already looking at Ice XI on the surface of Pluto and on the moons of Neptune and Uranus. But instruments currently are not sensitive enough to distinguish the slight differences among the ices.

The most recently discovered form of ice, Ice XII, was found just a decade ago, although hints of it had been seen years earlier. John L. Finney of University College London, one of the discoverers of Ice XII, said that trying to understand all the different forms of ice was important for an understanding of how the water molecule works, and that was important in understanding how water interacts with all the biological molecules in living organisms.

"It gives you a very stringent test for our understanding of the water molecule itself," he said.

And could there be an Ice XIII?

"Yes," Dr. Finney said. "Call me in a month."

But scientists have given no word on whether any of these other types of ice are slippery enough to land a triple axel.

On the immunological benefits of exclusively breastfeeding for six months instead of just four

Prevention: Breast-Feeding, to Keep Infant Infections at Bay
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Two additional months of full breast-feeding may make a big difference in the number of upper respiratory infections a child suffers.

A new study has found that babies whose mothers stopped breast-feeding them between the ages of 4 months and 6 months had a risk of recurrent middle ear infections twice as great and a risk of pneumonia four times as great as babies who were exclusively breast-fed until 6 months or older.

The study, published in February in Pediatrics, followed the children until they were 2 years old.

The effect was independent of other factors that are known to be associated with rates of respiratory disease — age, smoke exposure, day care attendance, family size, education and socioeconomic status.

Stopping full breast-feeding at 4 months increased the risk of infection even more than day care attendance or exposure to smoke.

"I was a little surprised that the effect was so large," said Dr. Caroline J. Chantry, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California, Davis, and the study's lead author.

The longer the duration of breast-feeding, the study found, the greater the protection, and the protective effect endured until the children were 2, even when exclusive breast-feeding stopped at 6 months.

The study, the authors acknowledge, had certain weaknesses: the figures on day care did not account for the number of children in attendance; the researchers were unable to adjust for pacifier use; and the data on infections depended on parental reports.

Still, Dr. Chantry said, "If you can exclusively breast-feed for six months, you're doing your baby a big favor."

A column that's really about anecdotal versus statistical data (though it doesn't say that)

Impressive Science Meets Unimpressed Patient (Hi, Mom!)
By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D.

Every time I visit my elderly mother, we have the same discussion.

"You need to get some exercise," I say.

"There's no point," she says.

"You're losing all your muscles," I say.

"Natural obsolescence," she says.

"You need to lift weights."

"Oh, it wouldn't make any difference."

"Studies show it makes a big difference."

"Studies," she says, dripping scorn. "Don't give me studies. Look at Tee. Look at all the exercise she did. She never stopped exercising. Look what happened to her."

End of discussion. Tee, her old friend and contemporary, took physical fitness seriously, and wound up bedbound in a nursing home, felled by osteoporosis and strokes, while my mother, who has not broken a sweat in the last 60 years, still totters around on ever-thinning pins. So much for exercise. So much for studies. So much for modern clinical medicine, based on the randomized allocation of treatment and placebo. All that beautiful science, stymied by the single, incontrovertible, inescapable image of Tee, the one who exercised but grew hunched and crippled anyway.

It is medicine's eternal quest, these days, to sell impressive science to unimpressed patients, and it is hard to think of a group less equipped to do it than doctors. Doctors are specifically trained not to think like normal people, not to see what others see or to reason as others reason. They — er, we — come to operate in an atmosphere so thin, so heady and attenuated with the power of statistical analysis, that one might wonder whether we are really on the same planet as the patients we try to convince of our truths.

"Exercise helps the elderly." The doctor sees, from a perch suspended somewhere up in the sky, a large football field filled with the elderly. There are thousands of them down there, all dressed in sweats and sneakers, dumbbells at their feet. Half of them are using the dumbbells, or are down on their backs, doing leg lifts. The others just stand around.

Over the years, of course, the ranks thin. The doctor watches, counts. It begins to look as if there are more exercisers left. After decades, there are definitely more exercisers. Of course, there are still a few sloths standing around (and one of them looks suspiciously like my mother). But by and large, the exercisers come to rule the field.

That is the view from on high. Down on the field, of course, the view is quite different. You are standing in a thick crowd, minding your own business, living your life, but you cannot help noting that the man over there threw his back out with all that exercise, and the woman next to you, grunting to lift her dumbbell, had a heart attack. You cannot see to the other end of the field and have no idea what is happening there. But watching all the sweating and grunting and seeing some of those exercisers disappear anyway, you decide to opt out.

And when that voice from the sky issues the command, "Exercise!" you say you're too busy.

Who can honestly say one perspective is right and one is wrong? They both have their problems. Up in the sky, it is impossible to distinguish one individual from another. The subjects are identified by sex, race, age, weight, coexisting illnesses, but of course, those variables have little to do with who these people are and what they value, how they prefer to spend their time, what they know about their own bodies.

Down on the field, no one sees anything but the people who happen to be nearby. No big picture there: you know what's going on around you, and nothing else. And if you happen to be in a crowd of exercisers who happen to get no benefit from it, then that is your reality.

And, be it exercise, smoking, diet or medication for any condition you can name, whether you are pro or con boils down to the difference between the same two perspectives.

Good doctors learn some tricks, over the years, to let patients see what they see. It helps, sometimes, to descend part of the way down from the sky and give a smaller version of the big picture. ("Of all my patients, it's the ones who exercise who do the best.") Sometimes it helps to get down completely, and see what the patient sees ("Your grandmother smoked till she was 90, but you may not be so lucky.")

But sometimes there is no convergence of views. The patient who sees only from the ground, the doctor who sees only from the sky may simply have to agree to disagree, and have the same dialogue over and over again.

"You need to get some exercise."

"Not that again. Stop."

"Do you mind if I write a column about you? So others can learn from this ridiculous stalemate?"

"I donate myself to science."

On fees for going through the justice system. Worth reading

Debt to Society Is Least of Costs for Ex-Convicts
By ADAM LIPTAK

It is increasingly expensive to be a criminal.

Beverly Dubois, a 49-year-old former park ranger in Washington State, spent nine months in jail for growing and selling marijuana. She still owes the state almost $1,900 for court costs and various fees. Until she pays up, the state has taken away her right to vote.

Wilbert Rideau, 64, a convicted killer, spent 44 years in Louisiana prisons. Not long after he was released last year, he filed for bankruptcy in an effort to avoid the state's attempts to collect $127,000 in court costs.

Almost every encounter with the criminal justice system these days can give rise to a fee. There are application fees and co-payments for public defenders. Sentences include court costs, restitution and contributions to various funds. In Washington State, people convicted of certain crimes are also charged $100 so their DNA can be put in a database.

Private probation companies charge $30 to $40 a month for supervision. Halfway houses charge for staying in them. People sentenced to community service are required to buy $15 insurance policies for every week they work. Criminals on probation and parole wear global positioning devices that monitor their whereabouts — for a charge of as much as $16 a day.

The sums raised by these ever-mounting fees are intended to help offset some of the enormous costs of operating the criminal justice system. But even relatively small fees — $40 per session, say, for a court-ordered anger management class or $15 for a drug test — can have devastating consequences for people who emerge from prison with no money, credit or prospects, and who live in fear of being sent back for failing to pay.

"The difference between 30 years ago and today," said George H. Kendall, a lawyer with Holland & Knight in New York who represents Mr. Rideau, "is that people who everyone agrees are poor are leaving the courthouse significantly poorer."

Prosecutors and political leaders often say it is only fair that criminals rather than taxpayers pay for what it costs to protect the public.

But Judge James R. Thurman of the Magistrate Court in Lee County, Ga., said his state's many fees, known there as add-ons, were a backdoor way to make poor people pay for the free lawyers guaranteed to them by the United States Supreme Court's decision in Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963.

"You're asking the people who can't afford to hire an attorney to pay anyway by making them pay through add-on fees," Judge Thurman said.

Indeed, according to the American Bar Association, at least 15 states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, charge application fees to people seeking court-appointed lawyers. Washington has one of the longest lists of fees assessed to criminals, and it is diligent in trying to collect them. Ms. Dubois, disabled after a car accident, makes payments of $10 a month toward what was once a $1,610 debt — $1,000 for a county "drug enforcement fund," a $500 "victim assessment fee" and $110 in court costs.

"I still don't know who the victim was," she said.

Her efforts notwithstanding, her debt is growing because of the 12 percent interest assessed annually by the State of Washington. As of September, it stood at $1,895.69.

"I will never have it paid off in my lifetime," Ms. Dubois said.

Washington also uses an unusual tool: it denies people who have not paid such debts the right to vote.

"You have to complete all the terms of your sentence" to regain the right to vote, explained Jeffrey T. Even, a lawyer for the state. "If the monthly payment is low enough and if the debt is high enough, you can actually be going backwards."

Aaron H. Caplan, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington State, which has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Ms. Dubois challenging her disenfranchisement, said that tens of thousands of people were affected and that their number would grow. "Over the last 20 to 25 years, the Legislature has been making it more and more expensive to purchase back the right to vote," Mr. Caplan said.

National figures concerning fees assessed to criminals are not available, but Washington is something of a case study. The state sends out some 79,000 bills every month, and it collected about $25 million last year. But these collection efforts are barely making a dent in the $1.2 billion owed by former offenders, much of it for the cost of prison room and board, which can reach $50 a day. The budget of the State Department of Corrections for the two-year period ending in 2007 is more than $1.4 billion.

Fees for room and board are levied in many states, and they can quickly mount to levels that are essentially uncollectible, with states not bothering, except in special cases. Even other types of fees can be unwieldy.

Mr. Rideau, for instance, has been billed $127,000 for the cost of his fourth and final trial last year.

Louisiana wants him to pay for the costs of housing, feeding and transporting his jury from across the state. The prosecution has submitted bills from more than two dozen establishments, including the Seafood Palace ($435.68), Ruby Tuesday ($312.66) and Best Suites ($16,874.33).

His trial was expensive partly because Mr. Rideau was so famous in Lake Charles, La., where he killed a bank teller in 1961. He was convicted of murder three times, in 1961, 1964 and 1970, but appeals courts threw out the verdicts, citing misconduct by the government.

A fourth jury last year rejected the murder charge and found Mr. Rideau guilty of manslaughter, which had a maximum sentence of 21 years, meaning his sentence was complete. Mr. Rideau, who was also a prison journalist during his four decades behind bars, was freed that same day.

But Louisiana was not done with Mr. Rideau. David A. Ritchie, the judge in the case, ruled that Mr. Rideau was responsible for all of the charges billed by the prosecution.

"Mr. Rideau is the one that committed this crime that led to this trial, then led to all these costs," Judge Ritchie said at a hearing in August. "That's why people are charged court costs, because it's their actions."

Mr. Rideau has filed for bankruptcy, even though it is not clear that bankruptcy can erase debts of this kind. He has also appealed the decision, saying he is puzzled by the state's efforts.

"Society's interest is in an ex-con becoming solvent and in becoming a contributing member of society," Mr. Rideau said. "They created this court-costs sham to sabotage my efforts to create a life."

John F. Derosier, the district attorney in the case, defended the charges in court papers opposing Mr. Rideau's appeal last month. "He owes a debt to society which must be paid," Mr. Derosier wrote.

The assessment of court costs is common in civil cases. Many state laws allow or require the costs to be imposed in criminal cases, too, though rarely for an amount even approaching that sought from Mr. Rideau. Vanita Gupta, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which also represents Mr. Rideau, said his case might have unintended consequences.

"The prospect of having to pay for court costs is going to dissuade some defendants from going to trial," Ms. Gupta said. Even an innocent defendant, she said, may prefer a guilty plea to a trial if the downside includes not only a longer sentence but also a crushing debt.

Georgia is also aggressive in collecting fees, and it has enlisted private probation companies to help. The companies charge a monthly fee of $30 or $40 for their services. That fee can rival the fine.

"You're basically charging an interest fee that would make a finance company blush," said Stephen B. Bright, the director of the Southern Center for Human Rights.

In 2003, for instance, Sabrina Byrd, a 27-year-old single mother, was ordered to pay $852 for failing to leash and vaccinate her dog in College Park, Ga. Too poor to pay, she was placed on probation while she made 10 monthly installments, along with a monthly fee to a probation company of $39 — about half of the fine. When she fell behind and failed to contact the company, a judge revoked her probation and sentenced her to 25 days in jail.

Though the Supreme Court has said that defendants may not be jailed for failing to pay a fine when they have no money, they can be jailed for failing to report to their probation officer. Many poor people do not appreciate that distinction and fail to report when they have no money.

Judge Thurman, who was not involved in Ms. Byrd's case, said he took pains to tell people to report no matter what. Otherwise, "I have no alternative but to issue a warrant for your arrest," he tells defendants.

But some probation companies, according to court records, effectively use the threat of arrest as a collection tool.

John Cole Vodicka, the director of Georgia's Prison and Jail Project, questioned the current system.

"A $500 fine going into probation translates into $1,500 coming out of probation," he said. "No one's really benefiting, except maybe private companies."

New technologies can also add fees. Isecuretrac, an Omaha company that sells global positioning monitors to local governments to track sex offenders and others, promotes a system that encourages offenders to pay, often on a sliding scale based on financial resources. Thomas E. Wharton Jr., the company's chief executive, said about 70 percent of county agencies that use electronic monitoring charge the offenders for them.

"I don't think the intent really is to gouge offenders," Mr. Wharton said, "because they have a difficult enough time to get back into their communities and to support themselves."