Canada Geese Flying

Minnesota Indian Education Association:
BSU Student Wins Outstanding Student Of The Year Award

The Navajo Nation's own country music songbird, Victoria Blackie, has netted her first two Native American Music Awards nominations for her debut album "Wanted Man."

She is nominated for best country album and best female debut artist.

The Dallas, Texas-based Embrey Family Foundation has awarded the American Indian College Fund a $1 million grant over a four-year period for a Native women’s leadership program.

Freshmen biology students got a mix of plant know-how and culture (not the kind in a petri dish) this week.

Juneau-Douglas High School biology teacher Henry Hopkins teaches an extensive plant project, and as part of that he invited Tlingit Native Helen Watkins to share her extensive local plant knowledge with his students.

There are dozens of plants in Southeast Alaska that either produce foods or have parts that can be eaten. Some plants, and trees, have medicinal, recreational and storage value as well.

Juanita Hull-Carlson has done more than her fair share in leaving a permanent handprint on the landscape of Arizona. A master sculptor and art teacher, Carlson has led Arizona students both on and off the reservation in the creation of large, often functional, art projects, most of which have carried strong messages.

Carlson, who is funded through the Arizona Commission on the Arts, has returned to the STAR School to complete a project begun six years earlier - the creation of cement and found object mosaics to cover the walls of a three-tiered amphitheater.

A common heart. A common spirit. A common cause.

Yesterday's clinic here by the Iroquois National Lacrosse team was much more than a cultural exchange. For the students at Ke Kula Kaiapuni 'o Anuenue, the Hawaiian immersion school in Palolo Valley, it was an educational experience that linked the Hawaiian sovereignty issue to the recognition problems encountered by the visitors last summer.

When federal bureaucrats plucked three smart young Inuit boys from their families in the 1960s and sent them to high school in the south, they probably had little idea that they would help transform Canada.

But Peter Ittinuar, Zebedee Nungak and Eric Tagoona did just that, making their mark in federal politics, gaining aboriginal rights and negotiating landmark land claims treaties such as the James Bay agreement and the creation of Nunavut.

Branson audiences have embraced South Dakota's Native American band Brulé so well that all 18 cast members and their families moved there.

"The grandchildren are enrolled in the schools here," founder Paul LaRoche says by phone last week from the RFD TV Theater, where he performs in Branson.

Each time Navajo photographer Don James saw professional portraits of his tribe, he sighed—not in reverence, but in hopelessness.

For the glossy prints, mostly depicting ceremonies and cultural icons, failed to capture the daily life of the Navajo people.

Though the fifth-grade class at the Cherokee Nation Immersion School in Tahlequah use computers throughout the school day, their eyes light up when education services staff let them borrow iPhones.

Within seconds they cluster around the gadgets, happily tapping out messages like countless other cell-phone users.

But unlike most, their texts aren't in English - they're in Cherokee.

The words come out in abrupt breaths, as if Felipe Lopez were whispering to the chalkboard.

"Rseidy. Rseidy," he asks his students to repeat. "Learns."

"And Dizh. Dizh, say it with me, is 'language.' "

A class of 22 high school students is learning how to speak a language that nearly went extinct.

It's estimated there are about 10 fluent speakers of Yurok, the native language of the tribe.

This is the first year the language is being taught at Del Norte High School.

When Kyle McHenry stood in front of the elders of his Mechoopda Maidu tribe and played for them a program he'd created of their native language this summer, tears came to their eyes.

"There are no native speakers," he said. "It was worth all the work that I did just to see the look on their faces. They haven't heard it since they were kids."

One of the elders he spoke to was his grandmother, Delores McHenry.

Billy Chalakee remembers growing up as a young Muscogee (Creek) boy listening to his grandparents and parents talk in their Native language.

Even the family's church sermons were delivered in Creek. But Chalakee, 72, never really caught on to the language.

The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe received confirmation Sept. 23 that the Klallam Language Program was awarded a $483,744 three-year language grant. Out of 387 other applicants, only eight grants were awarded. Part of the funding will be used to train an apprentice to become tribal/state certified middle school Klallam language teacher.

Thousands of runners from across the country will converge in Washington, DC on Halloween Day (Sunday, Oct. 31) for the 35th Marine Corps Marathon and several runners from the Cherokee Runners group will be in the pack. A total of six members are planning to run in the event including: Gerri Grady, Robin Swimmer, Stephen Swimmer, Chris Reed, Jimmy Oocumma and Brian Burgess.

The next USA Cross Country Championships will be held on February 5, 2011 in San Diego, California.

The selection process for the 2011 Wings Team will be based on performances at the Nike Cross Nationals REGIONAL RACES.