Common Raven (Corvus corax)

Growing up in the mostly white city of Lethbridge in southern Alberta, Canada, Julian SpearChief-Morris often felt out of place.

"It was pretty difficult, especially in high school, because there weren't many people who looked like me, or came from a background like mine," he recalled. "I often felt I didn't fit in."

But after graduating from a local college and coming to Harvard Law School (HLS), with its diverse student body, SpearChief-Morris felt right at home.

What makes The Spirit in the Sky special is that Hollabaugh draws on carefully constructed relationships with contemporary Dakhóta and Lakóta people since the ‘90s, and fully acknowledges lasting friendships with scholars, native and non-native in his preface.

The lands of the sovereign Navajo (Diné) Nation extend across New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. The nation operates under a tribal form of government, but that wasn't always the case. The fight was long, and it wasn't until 1975, with the passing of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, that Navajos regained the right to control their own affairs.

On the Red Lake Indian Reservation in northwestern Minnesota, the Ojibwe people are working to reclaim their food sovereignty with recipes that celebrate their heritage and make use of the bountiful land that they call home.

At this year's second annual Red Lake Nation Food Summit, members of regional tribes came together to teach workshops on trapping, hunting, and gathering. Cooking demonstrations using indigenous ingredients reveal not only a path toward food sovereignty and a "decolonized diet," but also a viable option for eating heathy.

St. Paul's Ain Dah Yung Center has been helping Native children and families since 1983 but is now preparing to provide affordable, transitional housing for young people who normally "fall through the cracks" of social services and foster care programs.

The Minnesota Housing Finance Agency recently announced it is providing $9.4 million in housing tax credits to support a joint Ain Dah Yung and Project for Pride in Living project to build 42 small, apartment-style housing units on University Avenue at Victoria Street, less than a mile west of the Minnesota State Capitol complex.

Outside her office at the Peaceful Spirit Treatment Center on the Southern Ute Reservation, Navajo poet Esther Belin takes in the thin late-fall sun. Here in the Four Corners of southwestern Colorado, where the Southern Ute, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute and Jicarilla Apache reservations come together, the landscape is both beautiful and brutal in its spareness, much like Belin's poems. She's also an intake counselor at the addiction center, and she lives and works in that world of intersectionality, where language and identity overlap with the triumphs and failures of addiction.

Picture it. The judge telling you that you are to move to another state 1,000 miles away: away from everything and everyone you had known your entire life. My baby sister was almost one, but she would be in good hands with my grandfather. My mother was gone on another of her drug binges, and she signed custody over before we could be taken away. But if I gave everything else up, I could be with my dad who I had not seen in six years. My dad said we were moving to a place where there was nothing, but I didn’t care because I was going to live with him, and I would be happy.

Cole Currie, 11, wants to be a professional lacrosse player when he grows up.

He said he was inspired by the Thompson brothers (Lyle, Miles, Jerome, and Jeremy), four brothers who all play in the National Lacrosse League. Currie, who is from Mistawasis First Nation and lives in Blaine Lake, was in Saskatoon on Sunday to participate in the Youth Leadership Through Sports program. The program offers kids between the ages of 10 and 14 sport testing, strength and conditioning exercises, and sport nutrition education.

Currie said he hopes the program will help him in lacrosse and basketball.

On Indian Country Today, Christina Rose writes, “Without guidance, too many teachers may celebrate Native American Heritage Month in the only ways they know how: paper bag vests and feathers, classroom pow wows, and discussions on who Indians were.” Many of us who celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday would be hard pressed to know who the Wampanoag people were and are, what the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, Thanksgiving Address is, or that government policy forced “relocation” of Native Americans away from their productive farmland and the crops, like corn and pumpkin, that remain symbols of the Thanksgiving holiday today.

In 1990, President George H. W. Bush approved a joint resolution establishing November as National American Indian Heritage Month.

According to the U.S. Air Force website, 0.7 percent of service members are American Indian.

For decades Native Americans have been wholly misrepresented in the world of comic books, stripped down to a series of caricatured, homogenized tropes of the American Indian.

The WNC Honors Awards is built on a 68-year-old tradition of recognizing rural community development clubs for their innovative ideas and grassroots solutions. Several communities of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians were honored recently by the organization which covers 15 North Carolina counties and the Tribe.

The Big Cove Community Club and the Big Y Community Club both received the Communities of Promise award which includes a $1,000 cash award. Winners of this award are chosen because of the initiatives implemented by the community that show promise and can be replicated around the region.

Yale University and the Mohegan Tribe today finalized an agreement to transfer hundreds of objects of tribal origin from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History to the tribe's Tantaquidgeon Museum, the oldest Native American owned and operated museum in the country.

Leaders from Yale and the tribe signed the agreement during a ceremony in Woodbridge Hall on the university's campus, marking a new chapter in a collaborative relationship that spans centuries.

The Prairie Island Indian Community (PIIC) is in negotiations with the Friends of American Ski Jumping organization over plans by the latter group to build an Olympic-style ski jump on the Community’s Mount Frontenac near Red Wing.

Ski jump enthusiasts and Red Wing area boosters have been raising money from private sources for the project. Heading into August, organizers had raised $1.2 million and had another $1 million in pledges for what is estimated to be a $6 million year-around ski jump training and competition facility.

Some tribes in Colorado are setting themselves up to thrive by using renewable energy. The Southern Ute tribe is one of them.

The reservation lies in the southern part of Colorado in the municipality of Ignacio, Colo. near the New Mexico border.

On a gloomy day in September, Lisa Hayden rushed through the circular door of the Yurok Tribal Court in Klamath, California, with her 1-year-old son on her hip. Hayden, 31, worried that the day wouldn't turn out any different from all the others she'd spent in court trying to protect herself from her ex-husband. For 12 years, starting when she was pregnant with their first child, Hayden alleges, her ex-husband had held guns to her head, punched her, and called her terrible names.

The beach at Normandy had become crowded with the dead. Lifeless bodies strewn across the sand and others, animated by the surf, washing back and forth with the tide. Over 2,000 American G.I.s died there on June 6, 1944, as part of a massive Allied offensive to liberate France from Nazi control and to begin the ultimate assault on Germany itself. It was the final act of the most destructive and bloody war in world history.

A newly created Osage Nation Museum Collection Fund is now established, thanks to the Fifth Osage Nation Congress who established the revolving fund to set aside money for museum gallery items, storage and maintenance purposes.

Cochiti Pueblo has shut access to La Bajada, the cultural and geological landmark, saying it needs to protect the area from further visitor abuse.