Here is a summary of some Native American-related stories making headlines this week:
No mining in northern Minnesota forest for at least 2 decades
U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland signed a new order this week that will protect more than 91,000 hectares in Minnesota's Superior National Forest from mineral leasing for 20 years "subject to valid existing rights."
Public Land Order No. 7917 will protect parts of the Rainy River watershed, including lands ceded to the Chippewa Bands of Native Americans in 1854. It also protects the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, the site of a proposed copper-nickel mine.
Environmentalists say mining for minerals including copper, cobalt and nickel would produce tailings that can be dangerous sources of toxic chemicals that would threaten the Rainy River Watershed and the Boundary Waters.
In 2021, the U.S. Forest Service called for a full study of the potential impacts of the proposed copper-nickel mine. The company, Twin Metals, said it was "deeply disappointed" by the move and sued to reclaim mining leases in the area.
"The Department of the Interior takes seriously our obligations to steward public lands and waters on behalf of all Americans. Protecting a place like Boundary Waters is key to supporting the health of the watershed and its surrounding wildlife, upholding our Tribal trust and treaty responsibilities, and boosting the local recreation economy," Haaland said in a statement to the press. "With an eye toward protecting this special place for future generations, I have made this decision using the best-available science and extensive public input."
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Honor Beauvais, 12, a Sicangu Lakota student, died last month as a blizzard battered the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota after an ambulance couldn't get to him in time. Cordier Beauvais via AP
South Dakota tribes say state governor waited too long to help
The Sicangu Lakota of the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota are grieving the loss of six tribe members who died during a multiday snowstorm in mid-December and complain that state officials didn't do enough.
Victims of the weather included an elder who froze to death in his home and a 12-year-old boy who died of a respiratory infection before an ambulance could reach him.
The tribe declared a state of emergency December 16 and appealed to the state for assistance. Governor Kristi Noem activated the National Guard on December 22 to help remove snow and deliver firewood.
The State of the Tribes: Here are the facts. pic.twitter.com/6L4J7fQl88
— Ian Fury (@IanTFury) January 13, 2023
In a State of the Tribes speech to state lawmakers January 12, Crow Creek Sioux Tribe Chairman Peter Lengkeek criticized the state's emergency services as "slow to react." The governor's spokesman, Ian Fury, posted a rebuttal on Twitter: "It's a shame that Chairman Lengkeek chose to perpetuate a false narrative."
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An early 16th-century depiction of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his Indigenous interpreter, La Malinche (far right), who gave birth to Cortés' son Martín in the early 1520s.
British historian re-examines Age of Discovery
Tens of thousands of Indigenous Americans crossed the Atlantic before Britain founded its first colony in Virginia, traveling as diplomats, slaves and occasionally spouses and/or children of European men.
Smithsonian magazine this week reviews "On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe" and interviews its author, University of Sheffield (U.K.) historian Caroline Dodds Pennock.
"We know from the records that there were Indigenous people in rural Europe, across the Normandy coast of France, across Seville and the connected trans-Atlantic networks in Portugal, in Antwerp, in England," Pennock says, citing examples from her book.
An 1871 painting by Manuel Lopes Rodrigues depicts Catarina Paraguacu, daughter of the leader of the Tupinambás people in Bahia, Brazil, who married a Portuguese sailor. They and their three children would become the first Christian family in Brazil.
One of them, an Indigenous woman, traveled to Spain with a man named Pedro.
After several years, Pedro married a Spanish woman, who then tried to claim that the Indigenous woman named Isabel and her two sons, Lorenzo and Gaspar, were slaves. In 1570, they appealed to the crown and won both their freedom and monetary compensation.
"It was really important for me to focus on the early period where we see the beginnings of globalization," Pennock said.
These stories, she added, "speak to a bigger story that is incredibly relevant right now, about the origins of our world as an entangled, cosmopolitan place."
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This ca. 1903-1904 drawing by Cheyenne artist Charles Murphy shows men and women playing snow-snake game. Smithsonian Institution Anthropological Archives MS 2531
Ojibwe Snow Snaking returns to Wisconsin island
Next Month, Ojibwe athletes will hold winter games on an island in Lake Superior for the second time in 150 years. Madeline Island is the largest of the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior and has long been an Ojibwe spiritual center. In the 19th century, the government banned tribes from playing winter games there because betting was taking place.
On February 11, players will converge on the island to compete in a game played by many Great Lakes tribes, Snow Snakes. The game involves carving and polishing sticks of various lengths – the "snakes" – then shooting them like javelins down a trough carved into the snow. The snake that glides the furthest wins.
In another variation of the games, players throw the sticks like javelins. Watch the game in action in the video below.
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