May 16, 2021
On May 4, Native News Online reported news about the positive DNA identification of Melissa “Missy” Ann Poitra, a Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa tribal citizen who had been missing for 15 years. Her remains were discovered in a self-storage unit five years ago in Durham, North Carolina, some 1,600 miles from home.
Currents
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — On a cool Saturday evening, some three-dozen gathered at Ah-Nab-Awan Park that sits between the Grand River and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in downtown Grand Rapids for MMIWG2S event that included speakers and then finally a vigil.
Every week, Native News Online brings you the latest Indian Country news and moves from Washington, D.C.
ATLANTA — After a long year of wearing facial masks to protect communities from the spread of Covid-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Thursday that people who are fully vaccinated no longer have to wear masks in many indoor situations.
Growing up in rural Alaska, 18-year-old Quannah Chasinghorse (Han Gwich’in and Oglala Lakota) didn’t see herself as beautiful.
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Opinion
On May 4, Native News Online reported news about the positive DNA identification of Melissa “Missy” Ann Poitra, a Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa tribal citizen who had been missing for 15 years. Her remains were discovered in a self-storage unit five years ago in Durham, North Carolina, some 1,600 miles from home.
When the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that tribal reservations in eastern Oklahoma have never been disestablished in the McGirt case, it was a great victory for tribal sovereignty and self-determination. We celebrated that victory at Cherokee Nation, knowing we were ready for the opportunities and challenges that it brings.
Sovereignty
Situated between the high peaks and low valley floors of northern Nevada is Thacker Pass, an expanse of land that is bordered from the north and south by the Montana and Double H mountain ranges. The pass is in traditional Paiute and Shoshone land and holds great ecological and cultural significance, yet a new proposal to build an open-pit lithium mine threatens to disturb the area.
OTTAWA, Canada — Ten years ago, Rick Desautel, a member of the Lakes Tribe of the Colville Confederated Tribes (CCT) in Washington state, shot an elk in a subsistence hunt on what was once his people’s traditional land—on the other side of the border in British Columbia, Canada.
Education
LAWRENCE, Kan. — Dr. Ronald Graham, president of Haskell Indian Nations University, was removed by the Bureau of Indian Education last Friday after an internal investigation was revealed he was stifling the free speech rights of students and faculty.
DENVER — Overall Native student enrollment dropped in the fall of 2020 according to data collected by the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) and the National Student Clearinghouse. Overall student enrollment at tribal colleges and universities (TCU) enrollment is down by 1 percent with an 11 percent drop in freshman enrollment according to AIHEC; the National Student Clearinghouse data show a 23 percent decrease in freshman enrollment among Native students at all colleges and universities throughout the country.
Arts & Entertainment
Many people today are reexamining what it means to show solidarity, especially within Black and Native communities. There is an underlying and overlooked shared history between the two groups that American culture needs to acknowledge and incorporate into its narrative. As with any progressive societal movement, it takes multiple voices to speak up and form alliances to make impactful change. Emerging and veteran BIPOC writers are reassessing their approaches to representing these stories on television.
This weekend and next week, Indian Country is chock full of hot happenings, from a colossal cultural center opening, to an evening of Indigenous inside jokes, to a virtual visit with an award-winning artist who is very in Vogue .
Health
Business
“I have really slow internet at my house,” Alaska Native Iñupiaq seventh grader, Kaden Kulukhon, wrote in a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Kulukhon was among a handful of middle schoolers and educators beseeching the FCC to approve a licensing modification to send satellites into polar orbit, effectively offering remote Alaskan villages access to broadband internet. “All the people in my house use the internet. When COVID hit all the websites that I used at school could not load at my house,” he wrote. “Even at our school some websites won’t load properly and we consider the school internet ‘fast.’”
Growing up, when Harlan Kingfisher (Plains Cree from the Sturgeon Lake First Nation) would leave the house for big hockey games, his grandfather, or Mushum, would instruct him to smudge his blades and hockey stick. “Smudging” is the Indigenous practice of burning sweetgrass or sage in prayer to summon positive energy and cleanse one’s spirit.