The Rights of Manoomin; Dakota Land Map; and More!

In this blog:

• Rights of Manoomin Explainer
• Dakota Land Map
• Bdote Learning Center Gets MPR Write-up
• This Day in History: Indian Removal Act

Rights of Manoomin Explainer

A friend shared this link with me which does a nice job of presenting the rights of manoomin, or wild rice. (There is no clear credit for its creation, but its on a University of Minnesota link.) It opens with the following statement:

Following the 2009 “People Protecting Manoomin: Manoomin Protecting People” symposium and the resulting White Paper, the White Earth Nation and the 1855 Treaty Authority passed the “Rights of Manoomin” in late 2018. These rights include:

• The right to clean water and freshwater habitats
• The right to a natural environment free from industrial pollution
• The right to a healthy, stable climate free from human-caused climate change impacts
• The right to be free from patenting
• The right to be free from contamination by genetically engineered organisms

This project gives the history of the Anishinaabe migration story and the role manoomin plays in it. It discusses treaty rights, Minnesota’s Wild Rice Task Force, and threats to wild rice, such as patenting, genetic engineering and proposed mining in northern Minnesota.

Dakota Land Map

Marlena Myles, a Native American graphic designer and fine artist based in St. Paul, designed a beautiful Dakota Land Map with the original place names of this land.

Also check out her blog, such as this piece: “American Flag in Plains Tribes’ Art.”

Bdote Learning Center Gets MPR Write-up

Check out MPR’s story: A Minneapolis school is immersing students in both Dakota and Ojibwe, which talks about the Bdote Learning Center in South Minneapolis.

The idea for the school grew out of meetings of the Phillips Indian Educators group — an association of Native educators in Minneapolis. Director [Cindy] Ward-Thompson said she and her fellow educators were unhappy with the results they were seeing for Native children in Minnesota’s existing schools.

“We have huge amounts of dropout rates and teen pregnancy and suicides and drug abuse. And that isn’t who we are as a people. We’re a strong, resilient people and we don’t like looking at that data,” Ward-Thompson said. “We’ve got so many amazing things within our community. And we wanted to pull our kids out of that kind of a system. It’s just not working for our kids.”

This Day in History: Indian Removal Act

On this day in history, May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law, which set in motion the genocide known as the Trail of Tears, according to an article in Native News Online.

The law allowed the president to give Native nations in the eastern United States land west of the Mississippi River as an incentive to get them to move.

By the end of his presidency, he [Jackson] had signed into law almost seventy removal treaties, the result of which was to move nearly 50,000 eastern Indians to Indian Territory … and open millions of acres of rich land east of the Mississippi to white settlers.

Click on the link above for more.