Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus)

Victor Rocha

Victor Rocha began a website as the Pechanga tribe began its quest for gambling.

He's a Pechanga guy who grew up in Colton, the son of a graveyard-shift truck driver, a nothing-special teen who preferred playing guitar to playing sports.

But he has made good.

Fifteen years ago, as Pechanga battled state law enforcement and other casino owners to establish its gambling operation, Victor Rocha hoped to help his tribe by learning all he could about it.

"People tend to think of us as buffalo people, but really, we are horse people, too. That got lost and is coming back, and we want to document that," said Jim Cortez, the film's editor of "We Are A Horse Nation."

At the Red Cloud School on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Lakota is still the second language. But it's first in the hearts of educators and students who are bringing back the fast-disappearing language in a program that leads the nation.

The Kiowa tribe of Oklahoma honors its warriors with a ceremony more than 300 years old

Wash, slice and bake! It's as easy as that to make crispy, crunchy and salty beet chips. You've never tasted beets like this before:

Beets are really having their day in the sun. A once unglamorous, inexpensive root vegetable is now popping up on trendy restaurant menus and being used in everything from smoothies to hummus.

For years Osages living outside the service areas for the Osage Language Department have wanted courses online. In January, the language department made it so.

"Online Osage language classes are providing a connection to our heritage language for many Osage people across the country who, otherwise, have no way to experience learning our language," said Osage language staff in an email.

It’s early August, 118 miles from the Arctic Circle. Time for a walk to work.

The last time I wrote about hiking through the North Campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, summer was a puppy crashing into your shin. Now it has a white muzzle.

Will Lentz, a reader from Fairbanks, asks a question that flares every fall: why do some aspens turn red?A few scientists from Fort Collins, Colorado, pondered that subject in the late 1970s. Curious about red aspen trees people had noticed for half a century, they studied why these existed amid those with the more common leaf color, yellow.

Flagstaff High School student Daniell Albert is one of more than 500 high school cheerleaders and dancers across the U.S. who will perform in the word famous London New Year's Day parade in 2015. Albert is Hopi and Navajo.

.Nothing proves you’re a Navajo princess like sheep intestines.

At least that is what the newly crowned 2014-15 Little Miss Southwestern Navajo proved when she won over the judges with her ach’ii’-making skills.

Before the colonial era, 100,000s of people lived on the land now called California, and many of their cultures manipulated fire to control the availability of plants they used for food, fuel, tools, and ritual. Contemporary tribes continue to use fire to maintain desired habitat and natural resources.

Hundreds of aboriginal people -- who apparently really love fish -- took the bait of an impromptu viral social media campaign to submit their favourite fishing pictures, following a Vancouver Observer story last week that reported that pipeline-giant Kinder Morgan had questioned how much a B.C. band still eats fish.

Drums throbbed and the sacred circle of life was on display last week at what the Kootenai Tribe hopes will be the rebirth of sturgeon and burbot, at a ceremony dedicating a massive new 35,000-square foot hatchery for propagating and rearing both species.

Serpent Mound in rural Adams County, Ohio, is one of the premier Native American earthworks in the hemisphere. Its pristine flowing form was enhanced by major reconstruction in the 1880s. That reconstruction now appears to have been the second time in its long life that Serpent Mound has shed some of its skin.

A shrew, hunting insects along a stream bank, slips into the icy water. It swims frantically to reach shore, using all its energy to stay afloat.

Just as it appears the small critter might make it, an almost imperceptible ripple appears. And then the water explodes. The surface soon calms, but the shrew is gone. Trout food.