Yellowjacket

Two art pieces were unveiled Nov. 17 during a ceremony honoring the late Chickasaw legislator Dean McManus.

Chickasaw artists Dustin Mater and Brent Greenwood unveiled their commissioned art pieces to the Chickasaw legislature. Mrs. McManus was herself memorialized in one of the works.

San Juan College has been awarded two grants worth more than $2 million to help Native American students complete their degrees and provide scholarships for students in the nursing program.

The college was awarded a five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education that is worth about $1.73 million, according to John Boggs, the college's senior director of the Student Success Center.

Madonna White Bear Azure remembers being the only American Indian in nursing school at the University of North Dakota back when she graduated in 1982.

A "life-changing" approach to educating Indigenous children in 23 Ontario First Nations, emphasizing aboriginal culture and language, is to go into effect next spring.

The stage for the Anishinabek Nation System was set in mid-December following the passage in the Senate of the Anishinabek Nation Education Agreement, or Bill C-61.

The agreement is the result of 20 years of activism towards "delivering culturally-relevant and community-tailored education programs and services for the benefit of current and future generations of Anishinabek students," an Anishinabek Nation news release says.

POINT HOPE, Alaska — This is one of the most remote towns in the United States, a small gravel spit on the northwest coast of Alaska, more than 3,700 miles from New York City. Icy seas surround it on three sides, leaving only an unpaved path to the mainland.

Getting here from Anchorage, about 700 miles away, requires two flights. Roads do not connect the two places. Basics like milk and bread are delivered by air, and gas is brought in by barge during the summer.

"I don't know if people even know that we exist," said Daisy Sage, the mayor.

A 15-year-old in Prince George, B.C., will be spending 2018 trying to revitalize the language her family spoke for generations through an app and a summer camp.

Tessa Erickson is a high school student and a member of the Nak'azdli Whut'en First Nation. Growing up, she said, her father would occasionally speak to her in the Nak'azdli dialect of the Dakelh language historically spoken in central B.C., even though he wasn't fluent.

"He would just teach me small words," Erickson said.

The original Americans came from Siberia in a single wave no more than 23,000 years ago, at the height of the last Ice Age, and apparently hung out in the north – perhaps for thousands of years – before spreading in two distinct populations throughout North and South America, according to a new genomic analysis.

The findings, which will be reported in the July 24 issue of Science, confirm the most popular theory of the peopling of the Americas, but throws cold water on others, including the notion of an earlier wave of people from East Asia prior to the last glacial maximum, and the idea that multiple independent waves produced the major subgroups of Native Americans we see today, as opposed to diversification in the Americas.

Instead of partying during his spring break, Harvard undergrad Manny Medrano stayed on campus and deciphered the meaning of an ancient Inca khipu.

Khipus are knotted string devices used by the Inca people to record information like censuses and tax records.

"For about a hundred years, researchers have understood that many of these artifacts — there's about 1,000 of these khipus still in existence today — encoded mathematical data," Medrano, 21, told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.

"Kind of like an ancient Excel spreadsheet."

One by one, blankets are removed from Turtle Island and people are sent off their common land to the fringes, lost to smallpox and other diseases or removed from their families and homes.

In the course of one morning, about 20 RCMP instructors walked through more than 500 years of Indigenous history, as they took part in a blanket exercise that will become part and parcel of all new RCMP cadets' training from Dec. 5 onwards.

For Tara McMillan, who works in administrative services at the RCMP academy in Regina, the morning was "an eye-opening" experience.

"I realize that I have been very ignorant about our history and what has happened to the Indigenous people here in Canada," she said.

A new TV streaming app dubbed "the Ojibway Netflix" was launched this month by a Winnipeg-based company that says the app is the first Ojibwe-language streaming service.

When Jordan Jolicoeur took over his dad's small, part-time electrical business, striking deals with big energy companies was a distant dream.

That was in 2013, when he and his brother, Joel, became the owners of Carvel Electric, based in Stony Plain, Alta.

At the time, the brothers were happy to take any job they could land.

The eight Indigenous women Elders are acknowledged and celebrated for being vessels of their traditional ways and for leading in sustaining and creating legacies of strength and resilience for their own people, for all Native peoples and for all of humanity. We honor their gift of ancestral knowledge that they have so courageously and unassumingly spent a lifetime nurturing. The Legacy Leaders selected interweave indigenous knowledge, at times with western science, and embody integrity at its highest form.

Maxwell Kelsey sharpens the blade of his simple, two-handled draw knife, then pulls it in long and careful strokes over a freshly split piece of ash wood.

Kelsey, 34, never breaks his gaze, even as wood shavings fly into his beard and torn flannel shirt. For hours without rest, he splits, carves and steams the long ash sticks and then, proudly, lifts his finished product in the air: A wooden lacrosse stick, made using the same techniques as indigenous peoples of centuries ago.

Several Chickasaw Vietnam War veterans have vivid memories of the disdain some citizens of a divided nation exhibited toward them almost 50 years ago.

They are seeing a different attitude now.

Judge rules man's tribe lived on both sides of the border

An American Indigenous man's right to hunt in Canada has been upheld by a judge because his ancestors traditionally hunted in this country.

Fond du Lac has been working hard over the last decade to decrease carbon emissions, and it has been paying for itself in many ways, most recently on Nov. 2, when members from Minnesota Energy Resources presented the Fond du Lac Band's Reservation Business Committee and other FDL employees with a check for $129,013 as a rebate for FDL's energy services contract.

Years ago, piles of trash and dumpsters filled the grounds of Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal land. Over time and with a little bit of help, the same location where much of history is held, is being put to great use by preservation.