"A Warrior is challenged to assume responsibility, practice humility, and display the power of giving, and then center his or her life around a core of spirituality. I challenge today's youth to live like a warrior."
~Billy Mills~

A longtime advocate for Inuit rights and a former leader of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference has been tapped as Canada's 30th governor general, the first Indigenous person to hold the office. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the appointment of Mary Simon on June 6 followed by a press conference at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. Trudeau said Queen Elizabeth II has approved the appointment.

A news release includes some almost hidden news. The lede: "Southern California Edison, one of the nation's largest electric utilities, has completed its West of Devers transmission lines." The company said the deal was important because it added more power, renewable and battery energy storage to serve Southern California.

OK so far. Reading further down it's clear that a tribe is involved with the project. A new company, Morongo Transmission, owned by the Morongo Band of Mission Indians, will invest in the project and that's what allowed Southern California Edison to build the $740 million project across tribal lands.

Iti Fabvssa is currently running a series that covers the span of Oklahoma Choctaw history. By examining each
decade since the Choctaw government arrived in our new homelands using Choctaw-created documents, we
will get a better understanding of Choctaw ancestors’ experiences and how they made decisions that have led
us into the present. This month, we will cover 1880-1890, an era in which Choctaw Nation worked to maintain
sovereignty in the face of the growing influence of non-Choctaws living within the Choctaw Nation.

Cecilia Brooks is an elder of Wolastoqey, Mi'kmaq, Mohawk and Korean ancestry who calls St. Mary's First Nation home. She specializes in traditional plant knowledge.

Brooks grew up in different countries because her dad was in the U.S. military. He was her first teacher of traditional Wolastoqey knowledge, but she got her first taste of foraging from her Korean mom.

Puyallup tribal members led by elder and culture director Connie McCloud are harvesting sacred cedar on their ancestral lands for the first time in years.

"Our reservation has become so urbanized and we lost so much property with the coming of the treaties. Our traditional territories are shared, here we're on state property. So this is the first time we're harvesting on our ancestral lands for a very, very long time. And for many of the families and individuals, this is the first time that they've been able to traditionally follow our culture and help our community pick those practices back up," McCloud said.

Community supporters in St. Paul and at Minnesota's four Dakota communities are still raising funds and making plans with their sights set on a spring groundbreaking for the Wakan Tipi Center that is envisioned as a great Dakota heritage preservation and learning center.

With a recent $1 million appropriation from the Minnesota Legislature and additional financial help from the Prairie Island Indian Community, backers of Wakan Tipi have now raised $6.4 million of the $7.7 million needed to start work on the center.

Bikepacking, a heart-pumping blend of mountain biking and camping, is well established on long-distance bike routes like the Colorado Trail and Alaska's Denali Park Road. Similar to backpacking, it's an immersion into the elements, from camping beneath bright cosmos to cycling through unspoiled wilderness—two natural features the Navajo Nation is blessed with across its 27,000 square miles of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah.

But until recently, the reservation's bike tourism was more than lacking—bike tours weren't legally recognized as a permitted tourism category. In 2016, avid Navajo mountain biker and former racer Jon Yazzie of Kayenta, Arizona, set out to change that.

As children, Neilson Powless and his sister Shayna often traveled during the summers from their home in Roseville, California to Green Bay, Wisconsin. With their parents, Jack and Jeanette, the family visited friends and relatives and absorbed an important part of the Powless family heritage.

Jack Powless is half Oneida, the People of the Upright Stone, and one of five Iroquois Nation tribes. The Oneida originally inhabited what is now central New York. But it's now prominent in two locations in Ontario, Canada, and on the Oneida Nation near Green Bay.

A 5,000-pound totem pole that was hand-carved by Native Americans is coming from Washington state to be on display in the nation's capital this summer after a journey that organizers hope will raise awareness about protecting land that is sacred to tribes.

The totem pole's journey on a tractor-trailer, which organizers are calling the "Red Road to D.C.," involves a two-week trek led by about a dozen people, many of whom are Native Americans and members of the Lummi Nation, a tribe of about 5,000 members west of Bellingham, Wash. About $500,000 has been raised from dozens of nonprofits, sponsors, and tribal groups for the cross-country trip.

The Brooklyn Museum in New York City has voluntarily returned 1,305 pre-Hispanic artifacts—including stone figurines, ceramic vessels and tools—to the Museo Nacional de Costa Rica in San José.

As Alvaro Murillo reports for Reuters, the objects arrived in the Central American country late last year. Per a statement, the New York cultural institution previously sent 981 ceramic vessels back to Costa Rica in 2011. Both gifts were unprompted, meaning that the Brooklyn Museum sent the items without receiving a formal request or undergoing a judicial process.

When the COVID-19 pandemic reached the Great Plains in early 2020, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe set up checkpoints on all roads passing through the Cheyenne River reservation in a robust effort to protect tribal members. But over the past year, Indigenous leaders—from Alaska to Western New York—have made strides in vaccination rates.

The pandemic has hit Indigenous communities disproportionately hard, compounded by generations of historical trauma and mistrust. According to an independent study done by the APM Research Lab published in March 2021, Indigenous Americans have the highest actual COVID-19 mortality rates nationwide, accounting for 256 per 100,000 deaths in the United States.

Chase Soosay said he was stunned when a professor mentioned he wanted to nominate him for one of MacEwan University's most prestigious student awards.

So when the school's president, Dr. Annette Trimbee, called in June, telling him he had won the President's Medal, he was even more amazed.

STILWELL, OK – Josh Hitcher, owner of Boss Dogs food truck, started out nine years ago with just a hot dog cart.

Hitcher wanted to get into the food service industry but was unsure of how to get started. His late mother pitched him the idea of purchasing a hot dog cart and insisted that it would be a good place to start.

Five Indigenous students from the Upper Grand District School Board (UGDSB) have built a handmade birch bark canoe and paddled it on the Speed River.

Mentored by longtime canoe builder Chuck Commanda, it took the students nine days — working seven hours a day — to craft the vessel. They used natural materials including spruce root, birch bark, cedar, ironwood and oak.

About This Issue's Greeting - "Wáa sá iyatee?"

Nature's Beauty:
Macaw

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