In this blog:
- Webinar on the Rights of Manoomin (wild rice) Tuesday
- A first! Voter Registration cards in three Native languages
- New Virginia state park honors Indigenous people who lived there
- Native corn thought extinct returns to Nebraska
- The Lewis and Clark Expedition from an Indigenous point of view
Webinar on the Rights of Manoomin (wild rice) Tuesday
You are invited to attend an online deep dive into the White Earth Nation’s legal case to enforce the rights of manoomin (wild rice), Manoomin v. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. It’s the first rights of nature enforcement case to be brought in tribal court.
The webinar is Tuesday, Dec. 7, at 6 p.m. Register here.
White Earth Tribal Attorney Frank Bibeau will be presenting, along with Thomas Linzey, senior legal counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, one of the event sponsors.
A first! Voter Registration cards in three Native languages
A federal commission has released new national voter registration forms that are available in Diné, Apache and Yup’ik. “This is the first time the U.S. Election Assistance Commission has produced voting materials with any type of Native American translations,” according to the Minnesota Reformer.
New Virginia state park honors Indigenous people who lived there
Virginia’s newest state park is called Machicomoco, “a name that means ‘a special meeting place in the Algonquin language,” the Washington Post reports. “The park is the state’s 40th and the only one dedicated to Native Americans.”
The park “is preserving hundreds of acres of tall grasslands and woods overlooking the York River, home to Native Americans over several centuries,” the article said. “More than a half-dozen tribes lived in the area before White settlers forced out many of the Indigenous people.”
Here’s the link. (The article is behind a paywall.)
Indigenous corn variety believed extinct revived
The Pawnee lived for centuries in what is now Nebraska. They were People of the Corn. Corn was central to their life, as wild rice is to the Anishinaabe.
Pawnee corn was very colorful, Indian Country Today reports, “Kernels of electric blue, fire-engine red, ghost white.
In the 19th Century, many Pawnee were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma, the article said. “They were decimated by disease. “Half the remaining Pawnee died in a decade.”
The corn they planted struggled, too. The Oklahoma climate was unfamiliar. The soil too red, too alkaline, too dry,” the article said.
Fast forward to 2003, Deb Echo-Hawk, the Pawnee Keeper of the Seeds, was asked about the corn. She had 75 kernels left of “eagle corn.” Click here to read the story about how Pawnee corn has come back on their ancestral lands.
The Lewis and Clark ‘Corps of Discovery’ expedition told from an Indigenous point of view
A partnership between an Indigenous tourism group and the National Park Service (NPS) is interpreting the Lewis and Clark expedition from an Indigenous point of view, Indian Country Today reports.
The American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association is collaborating with the NPS “to develop online itineraries to promote the tribes that intersected with Lewis and Clark on their way across what became the United States.”
They are creating online guides which will include tribal events and sites. The stories will reflect the expedition “as told by the descendants of those who encountered the explorers as they made their way west.
Information will be promoted on two websites, LewisAndClark.travel and NativeAmerica.travel.
Click here for the full story.
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