This Week in Native American News: "love medicine", tiny houses, and quilted treaties
March 3, 2017
Celebrating Diversity and Seeing Students Succeed
Chanel Timmons writes:
I’m a Black woman from Oakland, California who works on the Waianae Coast, where few people look like me. In my search to find connections on the island, I’ve found understanding and points of intersection with my Native Hawaiian students.
While every culture is rich and unique, parallels between the Black and Native Hawaiian communities have enabled me to develop stronger relationships with many of my students. This is not just a feeling in my heart but a reality in my classroom.
Read the whole story here
In other classrooms:
The University of New Mexico is part of a $1 million, multi-university study designed to examine the effect Indigenous language immersion schools have on Native American student success, both in the classroom and beyond.
While the goal of the study is to better understand how and why these programs may be beneficial, Lee says the hope is that it will help provide support for Native communities in strengthening their language education efforts and reveal to non-Native communities and policymakers the benefits of supporting these types of programs.
Read the whole story here
Love is the Medicine that Indigenous Youth Need
A recent public forum, focusing on the impact of how missing and murdered Indigenous women issue affects children and youth, opened the floor to the audience and guests to continue the discussion as to how to help today's Native youth.
Monique, a mother of 13-year-old twins living in Lekwungen territory in B.C., shares:
"It makes me think that we are on a journey, where love is medicine. And I don't mean love in the form of romantic love but I mean self-love, love for our family, for our community, love of our culture, our language and our ceremonies. Love of the land, the water and the stars."
Gray Smith says, "It calls on us to create safe spaces for our young people and our children, so youth can learn to identify and talk about feelings, learn to trust and feel love."
Read the full story here
Tiny House Phenomenon May Help Housing Issues
Davis is one of 13 high school students learning new skills, gaining high school credits, logging apprenticeship hours and getting a stipend at the end of their six weekends’ work building a tiny house in Yorkton.
More than that, the students are helping out their own communities in this partnership by Your Choice Homes and the Yorkton Tribal Council.
The tiny house is hoped to be the first of many, with the goal of improving the housing situation on reserves.
Read the full story here
History Lesson: What did the Louisiana Purchase ACTUALLY Cost
Vaguely defined at the time as the western watershed of the Mississippi River, and later pegged at about 827,000 square miles, the acquisition nearly doubled the national domain for a mere $15 million, or roughly $309 million in today’s dollars.
What Thomas Jefferson purchased wasn’t actually a tract of land. It was the imperial rights to that land, almost all of which was still owned, occupied, and ruled by Native Americans. The U.S. paid France $15 million for those rights. It would take more than 150 years and hundreds of lopsided treaties to extinguish Indian title to the same land.
Figuring out how much the United States has actually spent to extinguish Indian title to the Louisiana Territory, tracked in the interactive piece here from 1804 through 2012, yielded a figure much higher than anyone previously imagined—and yet still far from what the land was actually worth. All told, it adds up to about $2.6 billion, or more than $8.5 billion adjusted for inflation.
Read the full story here
Speaking of treaties...
Gina Adams sews text from the American Indian Treaties onto quilts, articulating the deception and violence used to marginalize Native Americans in the formation of the United States.
See her quilts here
Tired of the same old music?
Try Powwow in the Club
It's hard to fit so much news in such a small space.
To read all of this week's news, visit the LIM Magazine.
Sign up to get these emails in your inbox and never miss a week again!