Imprisoned since 1977 for the murder of two FBI agents during a gun battle on the Oglala Sioux, Pine Ridge Reservation, Leonard Peltier was denied parole this past Friday. Peltier’s last parole hearing was sixteen years ago. He will not receive another hearing until 2024, when he will be seventy-nine years old. People generally inclined […]
The Legal Justification for the Native Conquest
Nazune Menka is a graduate student in environmental science who this past spring semester was participating in the Native American Political Leadership Program at George Washington University. Through the program, she had the opportunity, with other students, to meet with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The students were given the opportunity to ask questions of […]
In a Navajo Way
Robert Yazzie and Amber Kanazloah Crotty don’t like to say that Navajos have “lost” their knowledge of their native traditions. They might say that some Navajos are not in “relationship” with elements of their culture. The knowledge is there somewhere, as a part of who they are – like a vague sense of “coyote” as […]
Some Pawnee Come Home
Prior to 1907 there existed in the United States an area referred to as the Indian Territory, an area, ultimately reduced to the Oklahoma territory, to which various Indian Tribes were removed from their native grounds in order to make way for white settlement. These relocations became famously dramatic through the Trail of Tears that […]
Code Talker
Originally there were twenty-nine. They developed the code. Then there were about 390 more. Sam Tso was one of the 390. During the Second World War, he was a Navajo Code Talker. It had been done before, on a smaller scale, with the Cherokee and Choctaw, in the First World War. The Comanche were used […]