WESTERN SKIES - November 15, 2005

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ERIC WHITNEY: A study released yesterday suggests that Pueblo's strict indoor smoking ban has dramatically reduced the number of heart attacks in the city. Doctor Christine Nevin-Woods, director of the Pueblo City-County Health Department, explains.

CHRISTINE NEVIN-WOODS: We studied heart attack rates at two of our hospitals in Pueblo, over a three-year period, a year and a half before the ordinance, and a year and a half afterwards. And what we found is that our heart attack rate went down almost thirty percent.

WHITNEY: The study was presented at a scientific conference of the American Heart Association in Dallas yesterday. Doctor Nevin-Woods says that to date, only one other similar study has been done, in Helena, Montana.

That study also showed a sharp decline in heart-attacks in the wake of an indoor smoking ban. The Pueblo study says that in the year and a half before the city's smoke-free ordinance went into effect, three hundred and ninety-nine heart-attack patients were admitted to Pueblo's two primary hospitals.

In the year and a half after the smoking ban took effect, there were only two hundred ninety-one heart-attack admissions. That's a twenty-seven percent decrease. Doctor Nevin-Woods says that nation-wide, in cities without smoking bans, heart-attack rates in recent years have been dropping at a rate of about three percent annually.

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WHITNEY: The prominent Native American attorney and University of Colorado scholar Vine Deloria, Junior died Sunday. KUNC's Nancy Greenleese reports from Denver.

NANCY GREENLEESE: Deloria, a Standing Rock Sioux, helped push native peoples to unite as a political force. He headed up the National Congress of American Indians in the 1960s. Later, as an academic, his 1969 book Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto forced non-natives to reexamine their views and treatment of Native Americans. University of Colorado professor Patty Limerick says her friend and colleague wiped away stereotypes.

PATRICIA LIMERICK: He communicated to non-Indian Americans who Indian people were in their full complexity. Not cigar store Indians, not romantic noble savage Indians, but human beings with complexity and with treaty rights and sovereignty.

GREENLESSE: Limerick says that Deloria also revolutionized the study of Native peoples, showing academics that their scholarship was often inaccurate.

LIMERICK: All that stuff about the vanishing Indian from the late nineteenth century had really gotten pretty hard wired. And you could not be around Vine Deloria for more than twenty-one seconds without getting over that.

GREENLESSE: Deloria died of complications from an earlier aneurysm. He was seventy-two years old.

For Western Skies, I'm Nancy Greenleese, in Denver.

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WHITNEY: College students in Buena Vista have a new and permanent home. The grand opening of the Chaffee County Academic Center on Saturday made it the newest campus for Colorado Mountain College. The facility includes an art gallery, computer labs, and ten classrooms. Molly Adams has more.

MOLLY ADAMS: For more than thirty years, Colorado Mountain College's location in Buena Vista has been transient with classes located in store fronts, the classrooms of other schools, and any other place they could find. Now students will finally get a chance to settle down.

The new facility for the community college cost over two million dollars. That's not easy to come by since Chaffee County is outside the tax district of the college's nine other locations in Lake and Eagle Counties. Debra Crawford of the CMC Public Information Office says that the new campus would not have been built without help from locals.

DEBRA CRAWFORD: The community has really stepped up to fund this. It's been phenomenal to see the kind of support from businesses from foundations, from in-kind contributions, that we've received.

ADAMS: Crawford says the majority of the money raised came from community partnerships, grants from the Boettcher and El Pomar Foundations, and a loan from the Colorado Mountain College that will be paid back in the form of rent. The current enrollment of over six hundred students in Buena Vista is expected to double in the next year. Classes being offered at the Academic Center include early childhood education, small business management, and law enforcement training.

For Western Skies, I'm Molly Adams.