Old curving stone walls, rock cairns, underground chambers, standing stones, and other rock landscapes, long dismissed as agricultural field clearing, ice houses, or colonial root cellars, are increasingly being identified as sacred Native American sites in origin, sometimes going back thousands of years and often containing precise astronomical alignments.
Read More
Diane Wilson’s new novel explores the relationship between seeds and humans, and how our survival and abundance are intertwined.
Read More
Eva Dawn Burk stands on the bank of the Tanana River in late April in her home village of Nenana, Alaska. Burk is a graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who is developing biomass-heated greenhouses for rural Native communities.
From working on science technology issues in Indigenous communities, Kim TallBear is aware of the perception that Western science and Indigenous knowledge are separate things.
TallBear, an associate professor in the University of Alberta's faculty of Native studies, created a course called Indigenous Peoples and Technoscience.
Read More
Native Americans have been systematically dispossessed of their ancestral lands for more than a century, thanks to federal land management policies. But a spate of new real estate projects highlights efforts to reclaim that territory, as tribes invest in land development in an effort to diversify their revenue base and support their members.
Read More
Archaeologists have unearthed a rare trove of more than 80 metal objects in Mississippi thought to be from Hernando de Soto's 16th-century expedition through the Southeast. Many of the objects were repurposed by the resident Chickasaws as household tools and ornaments, an unusual practice at a time when European goods in North America were few and often reserved for leaders.
Read More
For years, Darryl Peasley and Sherry Gould, two friends and members of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation heard stories about various Native American sites dotting the region around their small southern New Hampshire hometowns.
Read More
Native American producers have long been left out of the agricultural conversation. Now that regenerative agriculture is trending, these growers show that caring for full ecosystems isn’t a new idea, it’s deeply traditional.
The California Indian Museum and Cultural Center is using a significant USDA grant to reconnect these tribal community members to traditional knowledge and practices, including foodways.
Read More
Native Americans are transporting a 5,000-pound totem pole from Washington state to Washington, D.C., over two weeks in July to raise awareness about protecting land that they consider sacred, according to the Washington Post.
Why it matters: The effort, which organizers are calling the “Red Road to D.C.,” has already raised $500,000 from nonprofits, sponsors, and tribal groups.
Read More
Last week, Native youth from New Mexico’s 23 Native nations, tribes, and pueblos provided ideas for future government initiatives and received strategies to improve their mental health at the virtual 2021 Indigenous Youth Wellness Summit.
Youth participants shared successful ways in which their tribal governments responded to the pandemic, the need to increase awareness of existing mental health resources, and their experiences during the pandemic, according to Kalee Salazar, the Special Projects Coordinator of the New Mexico Indian Affairs Department (NMIAD).
Read More
Louise Erdrich’s (Chippewa) novel “The Night Watchman” and Natalie Diaz’s (Mojave) poem collection “Postcolonial Love Poem” won the Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction and Poetry, respectively, on Friday. Finalists for other prizes included a Native cartoonist’s work about current events; a true story about an Indigenous woman’s search for justice in Indian Country; and a book that explores the role of Native peoples in the Civil War.
Erdrich’s “The Night Watchman” follows a Chippewa councilman and a young plant worker who embarks on a dangerous trip to find her older sister, according to the publisher’s description. It is set during the termination period of the 1950s and based on the life of Erdrich’s grandfather, who “carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C.,” according to the publisher.
Read More
A spiritual leader who was nationally renowned for revitalizing Native American religion and advocating for Native rights, Chief Leonard Crow Dog (Sicangu Lakota), passed away shortly after midnight on Sunday, June 6 on Crow Dog’s Paradise on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. Chief Crow Dog leaves behind his wife JoAnn Crow Dog and many children and grandchildren. He was 78.
Read More