Leonard Peltier is finally free, finally home

 

I wanted to share how I was able to interview the most famous political prisoner in the world in 1998.... Trace

CLICK TO READ:  https://laratracehentz.wordpress.com/2025/02/19/leonard-peltier-is-finally-free-finally-home/ 

                    Peltier released from Coleman Prison 

My 1998 interview with him that ran in News From Indian Country:

https://laratracehentz.wordpress.com/2016/08/05/parole-denied-peltier-waits-for-justice/

What Greenland’s Indigenous Inuit really want

Greenland's flag with Mount_Akuliaruseq in the background (Photo: Eider Palmou via Wikimedia/CC)

 

(and it’s not to be a part of America)

February 17, 2025 By Art Hughes 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download 

Greenland hasn’t had this much attention from America since the William Taft Administration.  Rhetoric, and even a few congressional proposals, are flying over the prospect of the United States purchasing — or perhaps invading — the autonomous territory of Denmark.  Strategic positioning and untapped mineral resources are the main drivers of the argument.  The likelihood of such an action appears remote.  The Inuit people, who make up the vast majority of the population, are more seriously focused on independence from the colonial power of Denmark and cooperative efforts to reduce the effects of climate change.  We’ll hear from elected leaders and other Greenland residents about the current political pressures.

Help for my closest friend

By Trace L Hentz (formerly DeMeyer)

Back in the early 2000s, I met Narragansett writer John Christian Hopkins, who is a prolific writer, author and journalist.  He worked as staffwriter at the Pequot Times when I was their editor.  John had worked for many newspapers, including USA TODAY.

In 2011, he and I started a small publishing collective Blue Hand Books (now called Bad Banana). 

About his writing:

A member of the Native American Journalists Association, in 2003 Hopkins became the first NAJA member to win awards in four different writing categories in the same year. "I've won awards over the years, but don't pay much attention to them," Hopkins said. "But I'll let you know when 'People' magazine names me Sexiest Man Alive!" Hopkins also served on the Narragansett Tribal Council (1994-1996) and founded the tribe's first newspaper. 

“Writer on the Storm” is a collection of irreverent observations on myriad subjects like the Kardashians, the Navajo, and Duggars. The book captures the power, humor and sentimentality of Hopkins’ writing. It includes a bonus chapter on the legendary TARZAN BROWN, a famous marathon runner who is John's great-uncle.

“We could not be happier to release both TWO GUNS and WRITER ON THE STORM at the height of book buying season,” said his publisher Lara Trace Hentz. “These books will make great gifts for everyone on your shopping list. John is truly a prolific writer; he just keeps pumping out great books like his hands are on fire.”

READ MORE: https://badbananabooks.blogspot.com/p/john-christian-hopkins.html 

Now living in Rhode Island, John fell and was rushed to the hospital in early February and his Navajo Wife Sararesa has posted this on Go Fund Me: https://gofund.me/f9757793

You can also help if you buy one of his many books!

HERE: https://bookshop.org/a/17780/9798862726312 

 

I thank you from the bottom of my heart if you can help them navigate his injury with financial support and his healing with your prayers. 

Megwetch, 

Trace

‘Ambiguous Loss’ — A Team of Researchers is Learning From Indigenous Women Whose Children Were Adopted

By Nancy Marie Spears | THE IMPRINT

Illustration by Christine Ongjoco.

Hoping to offer a rare in-depth look into how placing children for adoption impacts the lives of Indigenous birth mothers, a group of researchers is continuing efforts to document the experiences of American Indian and Alaska Native women. 

Their study, believed to be the first of its kind, focuses on mental health and grief. The research is being carried out in stages and has already surfaced several themes, including “ambiguous loss” — “a stressful and traumatizing’’ event that occurs when there is “no verification, closure, rituals for support, or resolution.’’

A small sample of Indigenous birth mothers informed the study’s initial findings, originally published in a 2022 peer-reviewed article in the Family Process journal. Now, researchers intend to expand their work by surveying a larger number of Indigenous mothers and further examining the roles of culture and history. Participants are being recruited online, and through word of mouth and flyers being distributed throughout rural and urban Indigenous communities. 

Understanding the systemic challenges that lead to Indigenous women’s children being placed for adoption might ultimately help inform future child welfare and adoption practices, said Sicangu Lakota elder Sandy White Hawk, lead investigator. Such insights might also lead to a better understanding of the specific support Native birth mothers need during and after an adoption, researchers said. 

 “It is my hope that it will motivate policy change on child removal — that child welfare will begin to focus on family healing rather than child removal,” White Hawk said.

Sandy White Hawk. Provided photo.

White Hawk’s interest comes from a personal place — she was adopted at 18 months old.  She is the founder and director of the Minnetonka-based First Nations Repatriation Institute, which helps Indigenous people impacted by adoption or foster care reconnect with their families and identities. 

For the study’s initial phase, her team interviewed eight women from Minnesota, Washington, New Mexico, North Dakota, Alaska, Oregon and Wisconsin. Researchers acknowledged the small sample size but said the interviews yielded “rich data’’ nonetheless.

Researcher Ashley Landers said previous studies involving the impact of foster care and adoption on birth mothers have mainly centered on the lives of white mothers.

“I don’t think it’s by chance that no Native birth mothers were included in birth parent research prior to this,” said Landers, an associate professor in the Department of Human Sciences at Ohio State University. “Their part of the story has been largely omitted — Native birth fathers have also been omitted, and the larger Native family impact is oftentimes not part of adoption research.”

History weighs heavily on the experiences of Indigenous birth mothers, making them “distinct from other races as they have been disproportionately exposed to systemic practices of forced child removal,’’ White Hawk’s team posited in the 2022 published article.  Culprits include U.S. policies that coerced parents into relinquishing their children to boarding schools, and the Indian Adoption Project — a federally funded effort in the mid-20th century to force the assimilation of Native American children into white families. 

Also harmful, they wrote, is the ongoing disproportionate removal of Native children from their parents through the country’s child welfare systems.

Taking this broader cultural context into account is crucial to understanding how adoption impacts the well-being of Native women, whose grief may be complicated by intergenerational trauma, researchers wrote. Two of the original study participants grew up in foster care, and one is a descendant of boarding school survivors.

Ashley Landers. Provided photo.

In all, the eight study participants were between the ages of 33 and 77 at the time of the survey.  Each had experienced separation from a child through adoption or foster care between 1959 and 2010.

How Bison Restoration Seeks to Heal the Quapaw Nation | NowThis

For many Native Americans, the restoration of buffalo/bison is as much about healing people and reviving our culture as it is about healing the land.  Bison once roamed the US prairie in millions, and had a close affinity with Native populations who used them for sustenance, health, homes, preservation of ecosystems, etc.  After colonists moved in, many of them were killed for sport, or even intentionally to subjugate Native populations. There are several efforts ongoing in the nation to improve bison population and 'rewild' them by slowly introducing packs into the wild. This has been done successfully in Montana and Oklahoma. 

‘Denying our truth’: The fight against residential school denialism in Canada

 

For over a century in Canada, Indigenous children were taken from their homes and placed in schools where they were stripped of their identities and abused. Activists have pushed for recognition of this history — but a backlash has formed, seeking to deny the trauma.

"They're trying to share a fake, different story about Canada's history, and they're denying our truth."   READ:  https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2025/2/7/denying-our-truth-fighting-residential-school-denialism-in-canada Read on ­

Passing it onto the next generation : Follow (Thesis Film) Sheridan College 2023

A child named Nimkii follows a mysterious blue butterfly away from his mother deep into the thick of the forest. Once caught Nimkii quickly realizes the butterfly is something not from our world..

STORY: 

Passing it onto the next generation 

Brent Beauchamp, an animator from Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario, says he was shaped by the women in his family — particularly his older sister Emmaline, who had a hand in raising him.

He created the short film Follow that's toured film festivals worldwide to honour Emmaline's own motherhood, and to share the importance of matriarchs in Indigenous families. 

Follow is a short film about Nimkii, a young child who is lured away from their mother by a shape-shifting spirit. (Submitted by Brent Beauchamp)

"Women in our communities play a huge role, especially being from Six Nations and the Haudenosaunee people.… Historically, women not only raised and taught children, but they also controlled lands," said Beauchamp, who is Onondaga/Haudenosaunee on his mother's side and Algonquin/Anishinaabe on his father's side. 

"They had so much power in our communities."

Follow tells the story of Nimkii, a young child who is lured away from their mother by a shape-shifting spirit.  

Emmaline, who translated Brent's script into Anishinaabemowin and voiced Nimkii's mother, says the work was deeply meaningful.

LINK: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/growing-up-these-indigenous-creators-didn-t-see-themselves-on-kids-tv-so-they-made-their-own-1.7450849

 

Night Raiders (Netflix)

‘Night Raiders,’ the sci-fi thriller film, invites the viewers on an adventure in a dystopian future that parallels the cruelties of the past. In a world where the government mandates for children to be taken away from their families and raised as military, the narrative follows Niska, a single mother, and her young daughter, Waseese.  Despite Niska’s best attempts, she loses her daughter to the authorities.  Yet after discovering a secretive vigilante rebellion group on a mission to save as many children as possible, hope rekindles for Niska, who might just rescue her daughter from a brutal regime.

Cree storyline is excellent

The film maintains an engaging storyline that focuses on the raw emotional dynamic between Niska and Waseese and their unfortunate predicaments. Consequently, viewers must be curious to know how the tale ends for the mother-daughter duo. REVIEW:  https://thecinemaholic.com/native-american-movies-on-netflix/

Night Raiders is on NETFLIX and I watched - it's REALLY good and reminded me of the dystopian books I've read by Cherie Dimaline. ... Trace👇

 

The Marrow Thieves is a young adult dystopian novel by Métis Canadian writer Cherie Dimaline, published on September 1, 2017, by Cormorant Books through its Dancing Cat Books imprint.^{[3] HUNTING BY STARS is a continuation of Marrow Thieves...}

She is most notable for her 2017 young adult novel The Marrow Thieves, which explores the continued colonial exploitation of Indigenous peoples.

Dimaline won the award for Fiction Book of the Year at the Anskohk Aboriginal Literature Festival for her first novel, Red Rooms. She has since published the short story "Seven Gifts for Cedar", the novel The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy, and the short story collection A Gentle Habit. 

 Read More: Best Native American Movies and Shows On Netflix 

 

PAYWALL:  (2020)

‘We’ve Already Survived an Apocalypse’: Indigenous Writers Are Changing Sci-Fi

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/books/indigenous-native-american-sci-fi-horror.html  

Indigenous communities reclaim 41 remains, hundreds of artifacts from WWU

After heightened attention, university continues efforts to identify and return ancestors

• Jan. 21, 2025   | Bellingham, WA

Western Washington University is in possession of 63 culturally affiliated Indigenous remains — 41 of those have been repatriated. Another 18 remains have unidentified tribal affiliations. (Hailey Hoffman/Cascadia Daily News)

By Charlotte Alden 

 

Western Washington University has repatriated 41 Indigenous remains and 238 cultural items to their ancestral communities, about two years after heightened attention to the issue. 

Repatriation does not mean those items have been physically returned to the Indigenous communities they belong to, explained Alyson Rollins of Western. Rather it means, legally, those items are “no longer in our control, but they’re still in our care.”  Tribes can pick up the remains and artifacts at any time.

A database released by ProPublica in January 2023 prompted a nationwide look into the more than 600 institutions that possess remains, including Western. Institutions that receive federal funding have been required since 1990 to return “cultural items” and remains to American Indian Tribes, Alaska Native villages and Native Hawaiian organizations, after the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).  

Western has repatriated artifacts since before NAGPRA, but committed in 2023 to accelerating its efforts. 

The university is in possession of 63 culturally affiliated remains — 41 of those have been repatriated.  Another 18 remains have unidentified tribal affiliations, meaning Western must work with 34 Native American tribes and Canadian First Nations to determine where they belong.

Five remains have been physically transferred to ancestral communities.  Rollins, who is the new NAGPRA program and collections manager at Western, said the university is still storing the rest for various reasons.  For example, a tribe may have requested the university hold the items until members can pick them up.

Tribes are not bound by federal deadlines like institutions are, NAGPRA Advisory Committee Chair Judith Pine said.  Communities can decide for themselves when to physically retrieve the remains and artifacts. 

Pine said Western is “standing by to facilitate and assist.” Pine and Rollins describe the university’s relationship with local tribes as “long-standing” and positive.

Western returned three ancestral remains to the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Josephine Jefferson, the Swinomish Tribe’s historic preservation officer told CDN in a January email. She said they’re now being taken care of by the tribe’s “spiritual people and elders.”

“This is where they belong,” Jefferson told CDN in 2023. “They don’t belong in a science lab. They don’t belong in a museum to be looked at. And they don’t need to be studied, because we are human, we are people, and we’re the first peoples of this land.”  

Alyson Rollins, WWU’s NAGPRA Program and Collections Manager. (Photo courtesy of Alyson Rollins)