One on survival after being pushed onto the tracks

Caught in the Path of a Subway Train? Risks Loom in Every Direction
By MICHAEL WILSON

Short of "stand away from the platform edge," there are no hard-and-fast official guidelines to survive an oncoming New York City subway train. "There really is no one thing we can tell people that would work in every situation," said Paul Fleuranges, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Depending on the station, one can seek refuge from an oncoming train in a few ways. None are foolproof.

A police detective with experience in the transit bureau recalled his training in last-ditch methods for surviving an oncoming train.

"They told us, 'Get to the cutouts or be able to roll underneath the platform,' " he said, referring to niches cut into the subway tunnels and the space under some platforms themselves, where homeless people have been known to sleep.

A quick-thinking person may also find safety beneath the train, in the so-called trough between the tracks, which offers up to two feet of space below a train.

In 2003, a researcher for an Internet brokerage firm, Brandon Crismon, was pushed into the path of an oncoming No. 5 train at the Union Square station. He scrambled into the trough and lay flat, in what his half brother described as "kung-fu mode."

The train stopped after two cars had passed over Mr. Crismon. He suffered a broken leg, cuts and bruises. He was lucky: The depths of troughs vary, Mr. Fleuranges said.

Finally, and no less a long shot, a person could try outrunning the train to the end of the platform, where it would presumably stop. In this and all situations, falling on to the electrified third rail could be fatal.

On road memorials

As Roadside Memorials Multiply, a Second Look
By IAN URBINA

HOCKESSIN, Del. — Once a week, Lyn Forester gets down on her knees, clears the cigarette butts, candy wrappers and beer cans away from the base of a stark wooden cross and holds a quiet vigil for her daughter, who was killed here in a car accident eight years ago.

Her ankles dangling from the curb as tractor-trailers hurtle past just feet away, Mrs. Forester says she knows it is both dangerous and illegal to visit this three-foot-wide median along Highway 141 near Wilmington, Del. But she cannot stay away.

"This is where my daughter's spirit was last," Mrs. Forester said, straightening up the plastic flowers and Christmas tree cuttings potted at the base of the shrine for her daughter, Jenni. "I'm more drawn to this spot than I am even to the cemetery where we keep her remains."

Roadside memorials like Mrs. Forester's have become so numerous, and so distracting and dangerous, highway officials say, that more and more states are trying to regulate them. Some, like Montana and California, allow the memorials, but only if alcohol was a factor in the crash. Others, like Wisconsin and New Jersey, limit how long the memorials can remain in place.

Now, in a move that is being watched by other states, Delaware is taking a different approach, establishing a memorial park near a highway exit in hopes of discouraging the roadside shrines. The park will include a reflection pool and red bricks — provided free to the loved ones of highway accident victims — with names inscripted to honor the dead.

Just 20 years ago, such intervention by states was unheard of, said Arthur Jipson, who has studied laws governing the memorials and is director of the criminal justice studies program at the University of Dayton in Ohio. Now, Mr. Jipson said, 22 states have such legislation, and the number has more than doubled in the past five years.

The efforts, however, have forced local officials into a delicate balancing act.

"Governments are reluctant to tell people what to feel or how to mourn," Mr. Jipson said. "At the same time, it's their job to keep these spaces public."

The popularity of the memorials has spawned a cottage industry on the Internet, with Web sites like roadsidememorials.com selling mail-order crosses to families that do not want to construct their own. Roadside Memorials warns customers that it "will not be responsible for any accidents or injuries due to the placement of your cross."

For some, the markers are poignant reminders to drive slowly and a small price to pay to help ease the anguish of loss. But to others, they are macabre eyesores and dangerous distractions that invite rubbernecking and visitors to already hazardous roads.

Highway officials also say the memorials frequently get in the way of road crews cutting grass or clearing snow. Other critics challenge their legality.

"For us, the memorials raise serious church-state constitutional concerns because they usually feature religious symbols and are placed on state property," said Robert R. Tiernan, a lawyer with the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wis., who successfully defended a Denver man arrested in 2001 after he removed a religious roadside memorial.

"I'm sympathetic to people who have faced this kind of grief," added Mr. Tiernan, whose 13-year-old son died after a car accident in 1981. "But the public space belongs to everyone, and I think it's important to honor that."

Debby Lewkowitz, whose 16-year old son, Adam, died in a car accident in January 2004, cites purely personal justification for her memorial.

"My daughter's school bus used to pass by this spot every day, and I still do when I drive to work," Ms. Lewkowitz said, standing beside the weathered bouquet of plastic flowers and silk butterflies she had attached to a wooden post and placed alongside an overpass of Interstate 95 in Newark, Del. "Unfortunately, the memory of my son is here, and to let it go unmarked simply hurts too much."

With no federal law governing the placement of the markers, state officials have been left to negotiate the issue on their own. Florida, Colorado and Texas will erect a nonreligious marker at the scene of a death. Missouri allows memorials but encourages victims' families to participate in the state's adopt-a-highway program instead.

Delaware hopes that its memorial garden will discourage the shrines.

"Our philosophy is that we want to keep our roads clean and safe, and to do that we want to encourage people to have a safe location where they can mourn," said Darrel Cole, a spokesman for the Delaware Department of Transportation.

Construction on the Delaware Highway Memorial Garden began in late 2004 but was halted last year because of a budget shortfall. The 11,000-square-foot garden will be at the Smyrna rest area along U.S. 13, the Dupont Highway, between Dover and Wilmington and will cost $75,000. Benches will surround the reflection pool, and a footpath will contain the inscripted red bricks.

Mr. Cole said that although state legislators enacted a law last year imposing a $25 fine for unauthorized use of state roadways, road crews tried not to single out memorials, focusing instead on removing illegal advertisements and political signs.

For Peter Medwick, an administrator at Wesley College in Dover, that is not enough. Memorials are for cemeteries, not highways, Mr. Medwick said, and it is the state's responsibility to keep roadways clean.

"The shrines are often left unattended for long periods," he said, recounting some he had seen with deflated balloons, soggy teddy bears nailed to crosses and photographs in Ziploc bags. "It can get really over the top and ghoulish."

Often called "descansos," a Spanish word for "resting places," roadside memorials are most common in the American Southwest. Most researchers believe they descend from a Spanish tradition in which pallbearers left stones or crosses to mark where they rested as they carried a coffin by foot from the church to the cemetery. Because of this heritage, the memorials are protected in New Mexico as "traditional cultural properties" by the state's Historic Preservation Division.

Mr. Jipson said that while no national survey had been conducted of the memorials, most transportation officials agreed that their numbers had grown in recent years. An informal study by the Maryland Department of Transportation in 2004 estimated that markers were erected after 10 percent to 20 percent of fatal crashes.

Sylvia Grider, a folklorist and anthropologist at Texas A&M University who has studied the history of the memorials, said their rising popularity in the United States was part of a growing acceptance of public mourning.

"Something happened in American culture when the Vietnam Wall went up and there was an outpouring of offerings in front of it that no one was expecting," Ms. Grider said. "It became more acceptable to express personal grief in these public areas."

The Internet has also fostered interest in the memorials. Countless Web sites feature extensive photo galleries of memorials from around the world.

Jacquelyn Quiram, of Shorewood, Ill., said she had sold several hundred crosses in the past year since starting Roadside Memorials. The three-foot crosses are stained brown oak or painted, and, at $80, they come mounted with a bouquet of cloth flowers and a picture frame.

Starting in August 2004, Marcii Magliulo of Penngrove, Calif., followed her daughter's college soccer team traveling across the country for over a year. Along the way, Ms. Magliulo photographed memorials and left notes asking their owners to contact her.

"I just found myself curious to find out who was behind them," she said.

Last December, she self-published a book that includes more than 180 stories and photographs, and she said she had sold several hundred copies on the Internet.

While many states have adopted rules regarding the memorials in recent years, Melissa Villanueva, a filmmaker from Kansas City, Mo., who is working on a documentary about the memorials, said the laws were almost never enforced.

"We found lots of people who dislike the memorials but very few willing to actually take them down," Ms. Villanueva said. "Most people can't help but feel like these are sitting on hallowed ground."

On a man fighting slavery in the modern world.

Modern-day abolitionist fights slavery

By Joel Brinkley
New York Times News Service

WASHINGTON — You can find Ambassador John R. Miller's office on the second floor of an unmarked, nondescript government office building in downtown Washington, at the end of a very long, empty hall.

There, Miller, a voluble former Republican congressman who is now a senior adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, waved his arms with a theatrical flourish one recent afternoon as he declaimed about his mission, "to help nurture a 21st-century abolitionist movement against slavery."

Within the State Department, it is virtually a one-man campaign, and Miller spends much of his time grasping for strategies that bring attention to his cause.

One recent morning he met with his staff to discuss giving the trafficking issue a boost by trying to link it to a more prominent priority of the Bush administration, the international fight against HIV/AIDS. Miller listened as his aides made the case, his tall, lanky frame spilling out of his chair. Trafficking victims often contract AIDS. But at one point Miller said he chastened his staff: "The research is not that focused. They don't seem to have zeroed in on it." Maybe this will prove to be useful, he said he told them at the end, maybe not. In the trafficking office that is often as good as it gets.

Late last year, though, he did a little better, making up a new award, "abolitionist of the year," and bestowing it on Michelle J. Sison, the U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. She earned the little plaque, bought at a local trophy shop, for her efforts to end the practice of enslaving young boys to work as jockeys in camel races.

"Is every ambassador like that?" Miller asked rhetorically. "No." In fact, cooperation from embassy staffs around the world remains problematic, he acknowledged, as many Foreign Service officers do not take the issue seriously.

Miller, a New York native, was teaching high school English in Seattle two years ago, when the State Department called to ask whether he would be interested in running the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.

Miller's name came up during a meeting to find a successor to Nancy Ely-Raphel, the former ambassador to Slovenia, the first person to hold the office. Rep. Frank R. Wolf, R-Va., said he told members of Congress and representatives of religious and feminist groups — strange bedfellows who have pushed hard to have the issue taken seriously — that his friend, Miller, would be a great choice.

"He is either the most foolhardy or saintly colleague I've ever met," Wolf said he told the group. "He fought for human rights in China, even though Boeing was the largest employer in his district."

That was enough for Michael Horowitz, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, who was representing a coalition of religious and feminist groups at the meeting, even though he said he had never heard of Miller before then. Since then, the religious and feminist groups have been his most enthusiastic supporters.

At that time, Miller, who grew up in Manhattan, the son of a lawyer, had been out of Congress for a decade and admits that his knowledge of the issue "was damn near zero." He read up, including news reports about the trafficking bill enacted in 2000 that set up his office at the State Department. The popular perception of the time, repeated in numerous news stories, was that the office would direct and coordinate disjointed federal efforts to combat modern-day slave trafficking.

But Miller soon realized that the office had little real authority. As it turned out, perhaps his most valuable tool would be the force of his personality, which is considerable. Miller, 67, is a near-perfect politician — personable, infectiously friendly and quick to laugh. With those talents, he plunged into the job with characteristic ebullience.

Slave trafficking, as it manifests itself today, is the transport of victims under false pretenses from one nation, or province, to another, where they are subjugated to forced labor or prostitution. The CIA estimates that as many as 800,000 people around the world are enslaved each year, including nearly 20,000 in the United States.

President Bush has spoken out about the problem, most notably in a speech to the United Nations in September 2003 that was largely about the war in Iraq, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was openly supportive of the trafficking office's work. As for Rice, Miller said, "when we hear there is a trip" to one of the problem countries, "we try to get her to mention it." They have not had much success.

"We've got to do better," Miller said.

His office is half a mile from the State Department, in a nondescript government building that also houses backwater agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs' credit union. Some people see that as symbolic, but Miller said the location had "has pluses and minuses."

This fall the trafficking office did gain a measure of prominence when the State Department was looking for ways to pressure Sudan to end the violence against women in Darfur.

Another important source of influence is a report the office issues each year rating other nations' efforts to stop slave trafficking. Rice had shown concern about rapes, assaults and other violence against women in Darfur. So this fall, his department decided to tinker with Sudan's rating in Miller's report as a means of applying pressure on the government in Khartoum to end the violence.

Strictly speaking, of course, violence against women and slave trafficking are different issues. Miller contorted his hands and smiled as he tried to describe how rape "might be a precursor to slavery." Asked if his office opposed using the trafficking report in this way, he said only, "We are not going to get into internal arguments."

Those arguments, particularly over the contention by evangelicals and feminists that all prostitution is a form of slavery, made life miserable for Miller's predecessor, Ely-Raphel. "I must confess I was happy to leave," she said in an interview. The interest groups lobbied the administration to attack prostitution as a core problem, but Ely-Raphel and others disagreed.

"It was so ideological," she recalled.

Miller tries to finesse the prostitution debate. In a letter to the editor of The New York Times late last year, he noted that "in addition to being inherently harmful and dehumanizing, prostitution and related activities fuel the modern-day slavery known as sex trafficking."

While it has been an uphill battle, he believes he has made a difference, both on the slave trafficking issue and in the State Department's regard for it. He noted that he had played "some small role" in Japan's recent decision to reduce the number of entertainment visas for young women from the Philippines — to fewer than 5,000, from a high of 80,000 a year.

Mohamed Mattar, executive director of the Protection Project, an anti-trafficking office at Johns Hopkins University, said whatever the limits of Miller's office, no one does more. "I make the argument that they are making a difference, and no one else is making any difference," he said.

The bane of Miller's job, he acknowledges — only when asked — is the paperwork, the need to get approval, or "clearance," from a dozen or more State Department offices before he does anything.

One recent afternoon, an aide recalled with a smile, Miller charged down the hall, flapping his arms as he exhorted his staff, "Have we saved any victims today, or just done clearances?"

On the loss of young men from Reform temples.

Reform Jews Examining Ways to Retain Their Young Men

By DEBRA NUSSBAUM-COHEN
There was a new option among the dozen kinds of worship services available last winter at the biennial convention of the North American Federation of Temple Youth, which attracted about 1,400 young Reform Jews to Los Angeles.

As always at the conventions, there were lots of choices: one service was totally in Hebrew, for example, another used meditation and another was tailored to gay men and lesbians.

But one service, offered for the first time, seemed a throwback to a different time. It was for men only.

Male-only services could be considered a paradox in the Reform movement, a denomination established in the United States in the 1870's with sexual equality at its core. It broke from tradition by introducing mixed seating, bringing women down from balconies and from behind the partitions that had separated the sexes in synagogue sanctuaries.

The Reform movement, now American Judaism's largest denomination, with some 1.5 million members, was also the first to ordain women as rabbis, in 1972.

But it is losing its young men.

That is enough of a concern that the Reform movement's major organizations recently formed a commission to study the matter, and the director of admissions at the movement's rabbinical seminary is leading the panel.

The class of 39 people that began rabbinical studies at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion last fall has twice as many women as men. Still, of 1,888 members of the Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis, only 432 are women.

Rabbi Michael Friedman, director of junior and senior high school programs at the Union for Reform Judaism, which serves its congregations, recently surveyed all of the movement's youth group, leadership training, camping and Israel programs for teenagers and young adults.

Attendance records since 2003 showed that girls accounted for 57 percent to 78 percent of participants in each activity.

Rabbi Friedman said there had been a major cultural change in the past 25 years.

"The change has been not only who the leaders are but also in their leadership style," he said. "Before, it was always a man high up on a bimah wearing a big robe in a deep voice, a model of leadership that was male-only and top-down."

"With growing egalitarianism, which I totally support, we've seen a major cultural change," Rabbi Friedman said. "Those synagogues now have everybody sitting in a circle with someone playing a guitar sharing feelings. It's much more participatory. These are all good things, but they are styles that women may be more comfortable with than men.

"I don't think boys have a problem with it, but they don't necessarily see themselves there."

Peter LaRosa is one of those boys. A 16-year-old 11th grader in Brooklyn, he attended Hebrew school at a Reform temple, starting in third grade. But the day after his bar mitzvah, "he announced he was never setting foot in temple again," said his mother, Susan LaRosa. "He's kept to his word."

A lot of his friends continued going to the synagogue, Peter said, but "I decided to focus more on baseball and snowboarding than Judaism."

Like many other young people in the Reform movement today, Peter has one Jewish parent and one Christian. Each year his family celebrates both Christmas and Hanukkah, and Peter said he felt that "we're never fully Jewish," adding, "I never understand things at temple, so it didn't strike me as an interesting place to keep going."

Interfaith families account for a significant minority of members in some Reform synagogues and a majority of them in others. Those numbers amplify the challenges congregations face in reaching adolescent boys and young men, which are rooted in a complex set of issues, one expert said.

In liberal Judaism, "we have to find something that relates to the reality of what boys go through," said William Pollock, a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and the author of "Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the Myths of Boyhood."

"They are struggling with who they are, with what masculinity means and what being a Jewish male means in American society," Mr. Pollock said.

"The denominational youth movements haven't tapped into things from that gendered perspective," said Mr. Pollock, who has been hired by an independent feminist Jewish organization, Moving Traditions, to explore the issue.

The problem does not seem to exist in Orthodoxy, whose public religious rituals are led exclusively by men, which allows boys to see an obvious place for themselves.

In 2002, Moving Traditions started a program of monthly celebrations for teenage girls called "Rosh Hodesh: It's a Girl Thing!" There are now 175 Rosh Hodesh groups around the country, whose activities are intended to foster self-esteem and Jewish identity.

"Many of us, because of the women's movement, had a sense of what girls want and need," said Deborah Meyer, executive director of Moving Traditions. "Ironically, now there's less known about adolescent boys. We wonder what do guys want?"

"We get asked all the time by our partner organizations with Rosh Hodesh groups for something for boys," Ms. Meyer said. "It's really an unmet need."

Moving Traditions recently started its own study of boys' needs and may develop some regular activity with both social and religious components just for them.

The Reform movement's initiative is approaching the problem in several ways. It is coming up with programming suggestions for its congregations to use at what it identified as six major entry points in synagogue life, including Hebrew school, bar mitzvah and holidays.

It also plans to help congregational educators learn how to distinguish between girls' learning needs and boys', and how to help the boys, Rabbi Friedman said. The initiative will also recommend that synagogues create mentoring programs pairing teenagers with boys preparing for their bar mitzvahs.

More male-only worship services may also be held in Reform settings, he said.

"We can't have a healthy, vibrant Reform Jewish community without men or without women," Rabbi Friedman said. "This is not about pushing women out and men retaking the high ground, but about creating space" for boys and young men.

When that happens it is a powerful thing, said Andrew Shoenig, who attended the men-only service at the Temple Youth convention.

"It was packed," said Mr. Shoenig, a freshman at Emory University and president of the youth group, which has about 10,000 members.

In ordinary services, "guys may not sing or chant as loudly" as girls do, he said. "The guys are just sitting there in many cases. So when we stuck 40 or 50 guys in a room, how was it that we became the loudest service there? The room was bursting with testosterone and energy."

"Maybe it's because guys didn't have to sing up an octave with a female song leader," Mr. Shoenig said. The setting "allowed us to just be comfortable and not have to worry about anything on the outside."

On female leaders of Native American tribes

As Tribal Leaders, Women Still Fight Old Views
By MONICA DAVEY

Correction Appended

PINE RIDGE, S.D.— Political life has been tense for Cecelia Fire Thunder since a little over a year ago, when she defeated Russell Means to become the top leader of the Oglala Sioux tribe, often remembered for its male leaders of long ago, men like Crazy Horse and Red Cloud.

Mr. Means, an American Indian activist and actor, challenged Ms. Fire Thunder's election in a federal lawsuit. Months later came the calls from some tribe members for her impeachment, amid complaints she had unilaterally made questionable financial choices and ignored the wishes of respected elders.

The Tribal Council voted in December to drop the impeachment complaint and keep Ms. Fire Thunder, but by then she and many of her supporters had come to believe that her sex was really at the root of so much turmoil. Though some disagree with Ms. Fire Thunder's assertion of bias, she stands as an illustration of the shifting role American Indian women are playing in tribal governments.

Ms. Fire Thunder is the first woman to be elected president here on Pine Ridge, the country's second largest reservation in land area, and one of a growing group of women Indian leaders. Since 1999, at least 11 leaders, including Ms. Fire Thunder, have become the first women elected to the top post on their tribes' governing councils.

In the past quarter-century, the number of women serving as top tribal leaders has nearly doubled. In 1981, a study paid for by the Department of Education and called "Ohoyo One Thousand" found that 69 of the more than 500 federally recognized American Indian tribes and Alaska Native villages were headed by women. (Ohoyo means woman in Choctaw.)

By 2006, the number of woman leaders of tribes was 133 among more than 560 recognized tribes, according to documents from the National Congress of Indians.

Among those leaders, Vivian Juan-Saunders, 46, who became the first woman to head the Tohono O'odham Nation in Arizona in May 2003, holds a master's degree in public policy. Erma J. Vizenor, 61, was elected in June 2004 as the first woman to lead the White Earth band of Ojibwe in Minnesota and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard. She is now known by tribal members as Ogimaakwe (pronounced oh-gih-maah-quay), or boss lady in Ojibwe.

Ms. Fire Thunder was trained as a nurse and spent years in California pressing for health clinics for American Indians before returning to Pine Ridge and working as a community organizer against domestic violence.

"I never thought my being a woman was a big deal until I got in," Ms. Fire Thunder, 59, said in an interview, as she glanced around Billy Mills Hall, a chilly faded auditorium here where a small cluster of residents men and women, young and old who had called for her ouster. "A woman may not seem traditional to some, but in the traditional Lakota teachings I grew up with, you are required to do what you can with what you have. That's been my whole life."

In part, the shift may reflect the other roles women have come to fill on reservations. Increasingly, women have become the administrators, the teachers, the community organizers, and more and more, the ones to receive broader education or work experience beyond the reservation.

In the late 1970's, slightly more American Indian and Alaska Native men than women were receiving bachelor's degrees, a 2005 study by the National Center for Education Statistics showed. But by 2002-2003, those figures had shifted: American Indian and Alaska Native women were far more likely to receive associate's degrees, bachelor's degrees, master's degrees and doctoral degrees than were men.

That year, 5,945 American Indian women got their bachelor's, compared with 3,858 men.

Just as women returned to reservations, opportunities were opening up for new leadership. Some came about because of accusations of mismanagement or wrongdoing by longtime leaders, some because residents were ready for a change after years of stagnant economic growth. Tribes turned to women after the arrival of the new, more complex management and accounting challenges that accompanied the rush of new revenues from casinos and other programs. All of the 11 women tribal leaders since 1999 are from tribes that have casinos.

"This may not be so much a sudden change as a natural outgrowth," said Stephen Cornell, director of the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona. "Over the last 20 to 30 years, as tribal governments have grown — partly because of the aggressive moves of tribes to take over governing functions and partly because of funding issues — tribal administrations have tended to be filled with women, and now that is reaching into senior leadership."

The downside, some of the women said, is that the rise of women may also reflect the struggles that some men are wrestling with on reservations — joblessness, alcoholism, poverty. Even with disparate tribes in distant places, a movement appears to be quietly building momentum among these women. Last summer, 150 of them gathered at Prior Lake, Minn., for the first conference of Women Empowering Women for Indian Nations, or WEWIN, a network for American Indian women pressing for political roles at the tribal, state and federal levels.

"What I know is that once you see other women do it, you have different dreams for yourself and that perpetuates more women leaders," said Susan M. Masten, who was the chairwoman of the Yuroks, a tribe in Northern California, until 2004, and is the former president of the National Congress of American Indians.

Change has also brought growing pains, both trivial and vast. How to adjust titles for constitutions (and parking space signs) that anticipated the possibility only of a chair-man. How to cope with council members or tribal elders who, some women leaders say, ignore their comments, repeatedly interrupt their speech making, or assume they are members of the secretarial staff. Some of those most critical of female leadership, these women said, have been other women.

Tensions were far more pronounced in tribes that elected women earlier. Wilma Mankiller, who was the first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and is considered the first modern woman to lead a major American Indian tribe, recalled the comments she heard when she was running for chief in 1985.

"I remember people saying that I wasn't — quote, unquote — chief material," she said. During a meeting, one man rose and told the assembled crowd of his fears: "If we elect a woman," Ms. Mankiller remembered him saying, "we'll be the laughing stock of all tribes."

Once elected, Ms. Mankiller consulted a communications expert, she said, because one council member repeatedly interrupted as she was speaking during meetings. Ultimately, she installed a switch for the microphones so that she could decide who would be heard.

Traditionally, leadership of tribes took different forms. In some tribes, clan mothers had a direct say in picking leaders, and female tribe members might be medicine women, holy women, or responsible for deciding whether to approve a war, said Jace DeCory, who teaches American Indian studies at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, S.D.

Now, with a rush of new women in tribal governments, the major agendas of those governments seem to be changing, leaning toward issues of child welfare, social services, education and Head Start programs.

In 1996, Kathryn Harrison became the first woman to lead the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde in Oregon. "I think it's been kind of hard for men to back off," said Ms. Harrison, who is 81 and now retired. "I think what has happened is that one tribe has seen another have such good luck with a lady in charge. So then they kind of put away their usual tradition and move ahead."

For some of the women, moving ahead also means an awkward balancing act. Last spring, Rebecca A. Miles, 33, became the first woman to lead the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee in Idaho. She won the post largely after making herself an expert on a water rights question, which had become the tribe's most pressing and controversial issue.

"We've become less traditional, and I'm part of that, and that is a tough thing for me to say," Ms. Miles said. "I'm a modern leader in a modern government, and that is good and bad. How does somebody like myself ensure that my leadership works to protect the traditions that are so sacred to us — and that may not have included a woman in this role?"

Here, along more than 3,100 square miles of bare, rolling reservation land, Ms. Fire Thunder will serve as president until the end of the year. Only her sex, she said, could explain why people were attacking her so often and with such vehemence for circumstances — such as the tribe's deeply-strained finances — which had been created by the male-led administrations, long before she came along. "I ran on my merits, not a woman card," Ms. Fire Thunder said. "But I walked into a hornets' nest. I didn't want to acknowledge it at first, but of course it has to do with me being a woman."

Mr. Means and others say she has little chance of winning re-election. And that, he said, "is not any way, shape or form about her sex." He said Ms. Fire Thunder, faced with previous leaders' financial failings, had laid off workers and failed to get proper approval from her people before getting a $38 million loan from another tribe.

Marie Randall, who is 86 and worked to have Ms. Fire Thunder impeached, agreed that sex was not the issue. Ms. Fire Thunder does not listen to the wishes of elders, as required by tradition, Ms. Randall said. She also left the reservation, went to school, held jobs, and, only then, came back, Ms. Randall said, contrary to the Lakota tradition of women of being "the generation keepers."

When Ms. Fire Thunder put on traditional clothing after being elected, Ms. Randall said, "It looks to me more like a dress-up."

She added, "It's not that she is a woman that I have a problem with, but I would trust her only if she would be herself as a woman."

On leeches.

His Subject: Highly Evolved and Exquisitely Thirsty
By CARL ZIMMER

The tub full of leeches sat on a table in Mark Siddall's office at the American Museum of Natural History. The leeches, each an inch long and covered in orange polka dots, were swimming lazily through the water.

One leech in particular attracted Dr. Siddall's attention. It had suddenly begun undulating up and down in graceful curves, pushing water along its body so that it could draw more oxygen into its skin.

"This is beautiful. Look at that," Dr. Siddall said. "It's a very complex behavior. The only other animals that swim in a vertical undulating pattern are whales and seals."

For Dr. Siddall, leeches are a source of pride, obsession and fascination. His walls are covered in leech posters and photographs. He owns a giant antique papier-mâché model of a leech, with a lid that opens to reveal filigrees of blood vessels and nerves. His lab is filled with jars full of leeches that he has collected from some of the most dangerous places in the world.

He considers the risks well worth it, because he can now reconstruct the evolutionary history of leeches — how an ordinary worm hundreds of millions of years ago gave rise to sophisticated bloodsuckers that spread across the planet.

This was not a case of love at first sight. As a boy growing up in Canada, Dr. Siddall was disgusted by the leeches that attacked him when he went swimming in forest ponds. Their biology began to intrigue him as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, where he became interested in how leeches spread parasites among frogs and fishes.

"It was hard for family conversations," he said. "You couldn't exactly talk about it over Thanksgiving dinner."

No one knew whether the parasites that leeches carry could hop from species to species or they were restricted in their choice. Knowing that required knowing how leeches are related to one another, something that Dr. Siddall found was an open question.

In the late 1990's, scientists were developing methods that could shed light on the evolution of leeches like sequencing animal DNA and computer programs that could use the sequences to reconstruct evolutionary trees.

By the time Dr. Siddall joined the museum in 1999, the evolution of leeches had become his chief obsession.

There was just one catch. To chart the entire tree, Dr. Siddall had to obtain species from all of its major branches. That required a series of expeditions to places like South Africa, Madagascar, French Guyana, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.

To collect leeches, Dr. Siddall and his colleagues take off their shoes, roll up their pants and wade into the water, even if its waist-high muck full of electric fish.

"You can't set traps for leeches," Dr. Siddall said. "We are always the bait. You can turn over rocks. You can turn over branches. But ultimately the interesting stuff is going to come to you."

Turning himself into bait is paying off. Dr. Siddall's research has shown that the ancestors of leeches were probably freshwater worms that fed harmlessly on the surface of fish or crustaceans, as the closest living relatives of leeches do. Not only do these worms have the most leechlike DNA of any animal, but they also grow the same sucker on the base of their tail that leeches use for crawling.

The leech evolutionary tree suggests that the earliest land vertebrates may have been the first hosts for leeches. Dr. Siddall has identified several major innovations that early leeches evolved as they became blood feeders. They acquired a proboscis they could push into their hosts to drink blood. Later, some leeches evolved a set of three jaws to rasp the skin.

Leeches also needed chemicals that could keep their host's blood thin so that it would not clot in their bodies.

Leeches have evolved many different molecules for that work that interfere with different stages in clotting, along with other molecules that prevent inflammation. Pharmaceutical companies have isolated some of these molecules and sell them as anticoagulants.

Blood is a good source of energy, but it does not make for a balanced diet. Mosquitoes and other blood feeders have evolved a symbiosis with bacteria that can manufacture the vitamins and amino acids necessary for life.

Leeches appear to have evolved their own partnerships, even producing special chambers in their throats where bacteria can live.

It is particularly tough to study these bacteria, because scientists need to find leeches with big bacteria-housing organs to dissect. It turns out that some of the biggest are in a species that lives just on the rear end of the hippopotamus. So Dr. Siddall has traveled to South Africa in recent years to wade into crocodile-infested waters to look for them.

"Obviously, we didn't wrestle hippos to the ground," Dr. Siddall said. Instead, he hoped to attract a few leeches that had dropped off the hippos. He failed to find any.

But fortunately for him, a game warden remembered him when a hippo was shot after raiding backyards. He sent Dr. Siddall a leech from the hippo's hindquarters.

"It turned out to harbor a completely unique lineage of bacteria," Dr. Siddall said.

After the original leeches had evolved the basic equipment to feed on blood, they moved into new habitats. Dr. Siddall's research suggests that they first evolved in fresh water and later moved to the ocean and to dry land. Terrestrial leeches became particularly adept at ambushing hosts, using their keen senses to detect carbon dioxide and heat.

They have 10 eyespots on their heads that they can use to detect moving objects. "They've got incredible vision," Dr. Siddall said. "You move your hand across their field of view, and they'll track the movement."

In his office, as he waxed poetic about leeches, one in the tub on his table crawled out. "Oh, jeez, this guy is getting away," he said. "Well, that's an interesting story."

He plucked up the leech and let it suck on his finger for a moment before putting it back in the water.

The leeches in the tub, Dr. Siddall explained, belong to the species Macrobdella decora, the North American medicinal leech. They are part of a lineage of leeches that returned from dry land to live in fresh water. But they still like to come out of the water to lay their egg cases.

After the eggs hatch, the young leeches have to crawl to the water.

Dr. Siddall has been making a careful study of North American medicinal leeches in recent years, figuring out which genes do the best job of revealing the variations between different populations of leeches. It turns out that some populations may actually represent entirely new species.

"We think we've found a new species in Harriman State Park here in New York," he said. But the biggest surprise came when Dr. Siddall applied the new techniques to the best-known leech of all, the European medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis.

In ancient Rome, physicians used that species to bleed patients to treat maladies like headaches and obesity. The tradition continued for 2,000 years. In the 1860's, London hospitals used seven million medicinal leeches a year.

Although physicians no longer bleed their patients, Hirudo medicinalis has been enjoying a renaissance. Surgeons reattaching fingers and ears find that patients heal faster with the help of leeches. By sucking on blood and injecting anticoagulants, leeches increase the flow through the reconnected blood vessels.

In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration approved Hirudo medicinalis as a medical device, and a number of companies do a brisk business importing them from Europe to the United States.

Working with Peter Trontelj at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, Dr. Siddall began collecting the leeches from across Europe and ordered them from supply houses. When they analyzed the leech DNA, they received a big surprise. "The European medicinal leech is not one species at all," Dr. Siddall said. "It's at least three."

Dr. Siddall and Dr. Trontelj are trying to determine the ranges of the three species and their differences. He expects his discovery will lead to changes in F.D.A. regulations.

More important, he hopes it will draw attention to the plight of European leeches. Overharvesting and habitat destruction have cut their numbers drastically.

"The situation for the true European medicinal leech may be a lot more dire than we thought," Dr. Siddall said.

To understand the true condition of all three species, Dr. Siddall plans to go to Europe. He will have to work the trip into a schedule filled with other expeditions.

"There are all sorts of things out there like Dinobdella ferox, which means the terrifying and ferocious leech," Dr. Siddall said. "It lives in eastern Bengal, and it will literally crawl up your nose and lodge in the back of your throat."

Dr. Siddall knows that the notion of leech conservation may strike some people as an odd pursuit.

He points out how many medical surprises leeches have yielded. New species will presumably yield new surprises. But he also thinks people should be concerned about leeches simply because they are leeches.

"Don't you think the world would be a colder, darker place without leeches?" he asked. He raised his tub with a smile. "Especially ones with orange polka dots?"

Details of how rats smell things

Smell in Stereo? Most of Us Would Just Say No
By JAMES GORMAN

English literature is rife with references to the smelling of rats, as in the classic verse report on maternal care in Felis silvestris catus: "What! washed your mittens, you are good kittens. But I smell a rat close by."

The scientific literature, on the other hand, is more concerned with how rats smell — that is to say, how they detect and process odors. And the answer, reported in the current issue of the journal Science, is — in stereo.

Rats, as many of us inside and outside of neuroscience have suspected, use their sense of smell to find the source of odors, good and bad.

They and other animals are much better at this task than humans. Witness the common behavior patterns of juvenile human males, who are so incompetent at pinpointing the location of unpleasant odors that they discuss the problem endlessly.

Rats have no such problem, as Raghav Rajan, James P. Clement and Upinder S. Bhalla at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India, have recently demonstrated.

They trained rats to associate an odor with water. Then the rats had to determine whether the odor was coming from the left or the right. This was done with a contraption that Mr. Wizard would have loved.

Two water spouts, of the kind that go in the hamster or rat cage, were mounted on a sheet of Plexiglas with a "sniff port" between them — a hole in which the rat could poke its nose. The odor was released from either side of the hole and the water was available only from that side.

The thirsty rats (water-deprived) had to figure out which spout to lick based on the source of the odor, and they did superbly. They were also fast — sometimes needing only one quick sniff.

Using brain probes, the researchers found that the sensory information from each nostril was processed separately in the brain, giving the rats enough data to determine location, even though the nostrils are not very far apart.

This discovery comes on the heels of recent work suggesting that dogs can sniff out very low concentrations of chemicals produced by cancer cells.

These are both reminders of the exquisite sensitivity of animals and the limits of the human sense of smell.

These limits may not be such a bad thing. Having a good nose is not always a blessing, as I can testify, because the world is full of good odors and bad and I tend to smell things that other people don't. I recently sat down for lunch at a restaurant and had to leave immediately because the place smelled as if there was something dead somewhere on the premises.

But, and here's the amazing part, the restaurant was almost full and none of the diners were making the "what is that awful smell" grimace. They seemed to have been blessed with some sort of selective anosmia.

Would it have helped if I had had a stereoscopic smell with the ability to pinpoint odor sources? I'm not so sure. Then I would have known exactly where the dead thing was, and how would that have helped me? I would be able to determine immediately whose perfume was choking me in an elevator. That couldn't have good results.

On the positive side, I would have figured out faster than I did where in the minivan one of my offspring had sequestered the remains of a roast beef sandwich that eventually threatened to make it undrivable.

It's no accident that Superman is known for his X-ray vision but not for the equivalent sense of smell. Otherwise he would have been sent into a coma by the ripe symphony of Metropolis.

If people had evolved to smell as well as rats, or dogs, if we were constantly exposed to a high-fidelity home theater version of the odors around us, I suspect we would have evolved what I consider to be a canine protective medicine. Dogs don't get upset by bad smells, because they love all smells. They have to.

Try this test: Think of a smell dogs don't like. Pretty hard. There are products on the market that claim to have odors offensive to dogs, but the fact that these products have been developed at all says something. No research and development would be needed to find smells that people don't like.

I think it's obvious that dogs evolved a love of all things smelly to protect them from going crazy. You couldn't live with such an acute sense of smell if you were repelled by garbage. You have to be so enamored of odors of any kind that rolling in a decomposing fish on the beach seems like a great idea.

I don't recall rats being all that offended by places that smell "bad" either.

So I'm happy to settle for a human sense of smell. I won't rail against my limitations. Not that it would do any good, of course, but even so, I have limited smelling ambitions. I want to be able to smell a rat, but I don't want to smell like a rat, if you see what I mean.