Native Americans

Native American News Roundup Feb. 19-25, 2023

The Supreme Court is wrestling with a challenge to a federal law that gives preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings of Native children.

Here is a summary of Native American-related stories making headlines this week:

Utah House to consider ICWA protections ahead of SCOTUS ruling

As the U.S. Supreme Court weighs whether to revoke all or parts of the Indian Child Welfare Act, lawmakers in Utah are working to make sure that Native American children in Utah’s welfare system won’t be removed from their tribes regardless of how justices rule.

House Bill 40, sponsored by Utah Representative Christine Watkins (Republican), is patterned after ICWA and specifies that Native families would be given preference in adoption and foster care cases involving children from the eight tribes in that state. Watkins said she wanted to make sure that federal language would be codified in Utah law before the current legislative session ends in early March — and well before SCOTUS is expected to release its decision in early summer.

Utah’s House Judiciary Committee placed the bill on hold in January, and after some tweaking, the bill will now go before the full House for consideration.

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Entrance to the academic quadrangle at Dickenson College in Carlisle, Pa.

Indigenous studies center to open near former Carlisle Indian School

Dickinson College, located near the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has announced it will develop a new center and academic program dedicated to Native American and Indigenous Studies.

Supported by a $800,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Center for the Futures of Native Peoples is looking to hire a director this spring. American studies professor Darren Lone Fight, a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and an enrolled member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Sahnish Nation, will serve as interim director.

The center seeks to advance the national conversation on and scholarship of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples and expand on Dickenson’s Carlisle Indian Center Digital Resource Center, a searchable database of school records housed at the U.S. National Archives as part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

“This is an opportunity for Dickinson to turn boldly toward its history and continue the hard work of reconciling with that past, as well as an opportunity for our students and faculty to expand on their voiced interests in Native American and Indigenous studies,” Lone Fight said in a statement on the college website.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the Center received an $8 million grant. VOA regrets the error.

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Family seeks justice in killing of Two-Spirit Lakota woman

Buzzfeed News reports this week on the case of Acey Morrison, a 30-year-old Two-Spirit person who was fatally shot in Rapid City, South Dakota.

As VOA has previously reported, Two-Spirit is a “pan-Indian” term for historic and contemporary indigenous people who don’t fit into normative gender roles. [[ HYPERLINK: https://www.voanews.com/a/native-american-two-spirits-look-to-reclaim-lost-heritage/4440354.html

Morrison was shot in the chest by a man she’d met online. The shooter, not identified, said he fired in self-defense, but family members say that doesn’t explain why her body was battered and bruised. They are calling on Rapid City law enforcement to investigate the matter as a homicide.

The story highlights the routine violence Two Spirit people face; Morrison was the 30th transgender person to die violently in 2022, and eight more would die violently by the end of the year, most of them persons of color.

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Muckleshoot Tribe Logo to grace hockey team jerseys

The Muckleshoot Indian Tribe in Washington State this week became the first Native American tribe to be honored by a professional sports team. The National Hockey League’s Seattle Kraken announced Wednesday that team jerseys will now feature a patch bearing the Tribe’s logo of a snow-covered Mt. Rainier.

“This joyful day brings with it a sense of hope, that our young people will see themselves represented by the team in the heart of Seattle and around the country with our Tribe’s logo on the front of every Kraken jersey,” said Muckleshoot Tribal Chairman Jaison Elkins in a press release.

As part of the partnership, a multi-sport court will be built on the Muckleshoot Reservation.

The Muckleshoot are a federally recognized tribe comprised of descendants of the Duwamish and Upper Puyallup, coastal Salish people who occupied the area around the Puget Sound for thousands of years before European settlement.

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In this Nov. 25, 2014 photo, ancient mastodon bones sit on a shelf, part of an extensive discovery unearthed from Snowmass, Colo., inside a workroom at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Indigenous Americans: The continent’s first paleontologists

Smithsonian magazine this week reports that that it was Black and Native Americans who first correctly identified millennia-old fossils.

When European colonists first encountered dinosaur fossils in America, they thought they belonged to a race of giants killed in the biblical flood. Enslaved Africans, however, noted the fossils similarity to elephant bones. And Native Americans preserved long-standing oral traditions of huge animals – “water monsters,” thunderbirds and “grandfathers of the buffalo” – that had once populated the land, water and sky.

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