A Navajo Nation librarian was given top honors recently for his contributions to literacy on the 27,000-square-mile reservation.

Irving Nelson, who serves as library program supervisor of the Navajo Nation, was selected from a pool of more than 500 librarians worldwide for the title of Librarian of the Year for 2010.

The Museum of Northern Arizona's new exhibit "Walking in Harmony: The Life and Work of Lomawywesa, Michael Kabotie" opened March 13. Kabotie (1942 – 2009) was a longtime friend and collaborator at MNA. This exhibit of Kabotie's innovative, reflective and spiritual paintings, prints, jewelry and poetry runs through Sept. 12.

Even to the casual observer at the Northeastern Arizona Regional History Day competition, it was obvious that there was obvious that there was something a bit out of whack.

Why were so many awards going to a tiny high school in an obscure corner of an impoverished Indian reservation?

As Red Mesa High School's honors history teacher, Wesley Cobb, proudly observed, "We took 25 percent of the group awards and 20 percent of the individual awards."

Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a University of Arizona (UA) doctoral candidate in Natural Resource and Environment, believes that Hopi is the ultimate example of sustainability and durability.

In a pasture past a white mobile home with three bent satellite dishes drooping like faded gray sunflowers, a gravestone-sized marker has been erected in the fenced-off field.

Dedicated in 1933, the stone and metal marker denotes the middle of what was once Fort C.F. Smith, an isolated outpost built by the U.S. Army to protect travelers on the Bozeman Trail to the gold camps of Virginia City. Now, only humps in the dandelion-spotted terrain mark the outer walls of the post, built on a bluff overlooking the Bighorn River.

In late February, Cherokee Nation Natural Resources acting director Pat Gwin gave a presentation at the Tribal Complex focusing on certain wild plants and their significance to Cherokee history and culture.

He said many Cherokee elders remember venturing into the woods with their parents and families to gather necessities, which included food and medicines the wild plants provided.

When Maria Hinton was born nearly 100 years ago, every Oneida family spoke the language of their ancestors. Now a great-great-grandmother, Hinton may be one of a few fluent Oneida speakers left in Wisconsin, but she is determined not to be the last.

Hinton recently put the finishing touches on an exhaustive recording of the Oneida dictionary. Taking five years of almost daily work, she recorded 12,000 audio files, including tens of thousands of Oneida words, and told stories she first heard in her mother tongue.

According to James Crew, developer of T.R.A.I.L.S., a software that teaches, restores and archives indigenous languages, Wickham Cuffee was the last Shinnecock Indian Nation member to fluently speak the native language. Cuffee passed away in 1925. But the Shinnecock language wasn't buried along with him. Though it has lain dormant for many decades, now a team of eight Native Americans, mainly comprised of members of the Southampton-based Shinnecock and Mastic-based Unkechaug nations, hope to wake this sleeping language giant through the revitalization of the Northeastern dialect of Algonquin, the language of the Shinnecock's ancestors.

When I think of my godfather, Mezinaanakwad, Fancy Sky, I picture him sitting calmly in his cozy rez kitchen early in the morning, sipping coffee while listening to jazz. He seems the very picture of serenity until I notice his hands buried in colorful strands of yarn, furiously working the threads into fantastically intricate patterns for bags and belts. Knowing him and his love for mathematics, I also imagine I can just barely hear a million tiny perfectly synchronized gears whirring away in his head.

He is lost in what he describes as an addiction, finger weaving. The essence of simplicity, the ancient art of finger weaving requires only fibers, a stick on which to anchor the fibers, and fingers.

Digging wild onions near her home east of Tahlequah is a spring tradition for Cherokee elder Dorothy Ice.

She digs the onions quickly as her long kitchen knife loosens the thin green plants, 6-8 inches tall, from the dirt near a small stream in Pumpkin Hollow. At the bottom of the plant are nearly flat bulbs with roots. She will later trim the roots and eat the bulbs along with the green stalks.

Ice smiles and laughs as she recalls lessons her parents taught her about picking the onions and living off the land during all four seasons.

As far as the records show, no one has spoken Shinnecock or Unkechaug, languages of Long Island's Indian tribes, for nearly 200 years. Now Stony Brook University and two of the Indian nations are initiating a joint project to revive these extinct tongues, using old documents like a vocabulary list that Thomas Jefferson wrote during a visit in 1791.

The goal is language resuscitation and enlisting tribal members from this generation and the next to speak them, said representatives from the tribes and Stony Brook's Southampton campus.

The highest-selling lot of Cowan’s American Indian and Western Auction was a circa 1900 Yavapai Apache olla with figural decorations, which brought $41,125. Estimated at $30,000-$40,000, the olla was desirable because of its intricate, well-spaced design and multiple figures. The March 26 auction had total proceeds of more than $762,000. The cataloged portion of the auction offered 507 lots, and an online-only second session that immediately followed featured an additional 309 lots.