Five-Lined Skink (juvenile) aka Blue_Tailed Skink

Bree Blackhorse just graduated from Seattle Pacific University with a degree in political science and a 3.2 GPA. The remarkable thing is that she did it in just three years while working full-time and traveling around the country with her parents going to powwows and art events. Seattle University School of Law was impressed and gave her its Native Scholar Award for 2010. It's a $120,000 scholarship which will pay her way through three years of law school.

Renee Wasson Dillard considers herself a "culture bearer" — someone who is passing down Native American traditions for generations to come.

Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians tribal member Dillard, 47, of Harbor Springs, is about to be honored Saturday, Aug. 14, during the Great Lakes Folk Festival in Lansing, as one of four 2010 Michigan Heritage Award Winners, for her lifelong work and perpetuation of black ash basketry, finger weaving and other natural fiber arts traditions.

American Indian students at North Idaho College have done something no other group has ever done at the school. They have established a scholarship program to help fund a college education for future students and they continue to add to that fund.

Last fall the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho donated $2,000 to the American Indian Student Alliance. Rather than use it for attending a conference or some other activity, the students decided to establish a scholarship program. During the remainder of the school year they held several functions that earned the club another $2,000. They recently presented a check in that amount to the North Idaho College Foundation which manages all scholarship programs for the college. "I'm glad the club is doing this, that we've created this, not for us but for the people that will be following us," Antonia Bancroft, Navajo, said. Antonia is a member of AISA. "It amazes me that students realize it's not benefitting us but future students. I think that's really cool and that the students realize that."

Soon, the popular Berenstain Bears cartoon characters will help bring the Lakota language to life in homes across the region.

On the first day of classes, Myla Vicenti Carpio, an assistant professor of American Indian Studies at Arizona State University, shakes hands with all her new students and welcomes them to class.

Then she tells them to imagine that she is a frontier-era missionary priest and they are members of an Indian tribe the priest has just met for the first time.

The Hopi Day school has always been a center of the community in Kykotsmovi. According to Principal John Thomas, it is a community school for the people. Thomas has been teaching in the BIA system for more than 20 years from White Mountain to Moencopi Day School. He has a strong feeling about community involvement and feels that Hopi Day School is a "community school open to activities."

The American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers has named Cara Cowan Watts, of Claremore, Okla., winner of the 2010 Robert E. Stewart Engineering – Humanities Award. The award, which honors outstanding contributions of agricultural engineering students to the advancement of the interaction of the profession and the humanities, was presented June 23, at the ASABE 2010 Annual International Meeting, held in Pittsburgh, Penn.

Often the mention of a museum brings to mind collections of the past. Nothing can be further from that image than the 61st Annual Navajo Festival of Arts and Culture presented by the Museum of Northern Arizona, which offered a lively picture of a vibrant, living people.

This year, two outstanding films were presented, both honoring Navajo women-"In the Footsteps of Yellow Woman," and "Hearing Radmilla."

Mona Curry recently stared teary-eyed at a film of her late mother speaking in the native-Alaskan language of Eyak at a tribal ceremony. Then she turned to a 21-year-old Frenchman for translation.

"She said that it's beautiful," Guillaume Leduey explained without hesitation. "It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you God."

Rosetta Stone, creator of the renowned language learning software, on Tuesday released its Navajo version, the first large-scale language revitalization project for the dialect.

Navajo, traditionally an oral language, still is spoken by more than 100,000 people, making it the most common American Indian language north of Mexico.

After living off the reservation for 60 years, Hazel Red Bird, 84, returned to reservation life in Eagle Butte, S.D., located on the Cheyenne River Reservation.

The Smithsonian Institution has returned a trove of precious artifacts to the Yurok Indians in California in what is one of the largest repatriations of Native American ceremonial artifacts in U.S. history.

Life is something of a dance for families on the mythical Mozhay Point Indian Reservation in Minnesota, created in Linda LeGarde Grover's short-story collection, "The Dance Boots."

Two steps forward, two back, a turn here or there and the tales weave rhythmically back and forth between the reservation, nearby cities and boarding schools, between eras from the turn of the 20th century into the 21st and between families, lovers and friends.

HighWater Press has just published “Stone,” the first comic book in the graphic novel series “7 Generations,” by author David Robertson and artist Scott Henderson. The ongoing “7 Generations” is a four-part graphic novel series that spans three centuries of an aboriginal family. It tells the story of Edwin, an aboriginal teenager who attempts suicide. His mother realizes he must learn his family’s past if he is to have any future. She tells him about his ancestor Stone, a young Plains Cree man who came of age at the beginning of the 19th century.

Archaeologists are teaming with Blackfeet tribal members to uncover a vast and little-known former hunting complex and bison kill site along the Two Medicine River used at least 1,000 years ago. Researchers say the 9-mile-long project area, containing a preserved system for driving bison over a cliff, bison bones and remnants of two campsites, could become one of the largest and most significant Blackfeet heritage sites in the region.

The need to preserve and honor tradition was a recurring theme in acceptance speeches Friday by winners of the 2010 Santa Fe Indian Market judging.

All the same, at least two traditions were fractured when, for the first time, two artists tied for Best of Show, and one of them won in a newly created classification: film.