Native News Network

Engaging Native American Learners With Rigor and Cultural Relevance

Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) in collaboration with Museum of Contemporary Craft (MoCC) is honored to welcome celebrated author, activist, and musician Joy Harjo, who will deliver the 2014 Alfred Edelman Lecture on Wednesday, March 12, 6:30 pm.

Harjo’s lecture is part of Illuminations, a city-wide event series celebrating Native arts and cultures centered around This is Not a Silent Movie at Museum of Contemporary Craft.

About Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. She just published her memoir, Crazy Brave, detailing her journey to becoming a poet.

Harjo’s seven books of poetry, which includes such well-known titles as How We Became Human-New and Selected Poems, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and She Had Some Horses have garnered many awards. These include the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas; and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2009 For A Girl Becoming was published.

She has released four award-winning CD’s of original music and in 2009 won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year for Winding Through the Milky Way. Her most recent CD release is a traditional flute album: Red Dreams, a Trail Beyond Tears. She performs nationally and internationally with her band, the Arrow Dynamics.

She also performs her one-woman show, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light,which premiered at the Wells Fargo Theater in Los Angeles in 2009 with recent performances at the Public Theater in NYC and LaJolla Playhouse as part of the Native Voices at the Autry. She has received a Rasmusson: US Artists Fellowship and is a founding board member of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. Harjo writes a column “Comings and Goings” for her tribal newspaper, the Muscogee Nation News. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

About the Edelman Lecture
When the late Portland architect and photographer, Alfred Edelman, taught three-dimensional design at PNCA, he challenged his students to consider the principles of engineering, kinetics, physics and other subjects seemingly dissimilar to art. In doing so he brought the outside world into his classroom. Founded by Carol Edelman, the Alfred Edelman Lecture was created to enhance the student’s understanding of the visual world by presenting timeless and/or unique ways to examine and manipulate three-dimensional space and to be a catalyst for lively discussions in the classroom at PNCA.

The Northwest Indian Language Institute has opened registration for the 2014 Summer Institute

– June 23 to July 3 – 

at the University of Oregon

Courses:

Linguistics: Introduction to Native American Languages, Intermediate Linguistics, and Introduction to Ichishkíin                         

Language classes: Chinuk Wawa, Ichishkíin, Tolowa Dee-ni’, Choctaw, Lushootseed, and Nez Perce.

Teaching Methods: Home Based Teaching & Learning, Early Childhood & Elementary Classroom Teaching, & Middle School through Adult Teaching.

Materials Development 1 & 2

Teaching Methods lecture and discussion       

Language Activism Seminar 

High School Cohort Program: High School program's core classes: language, linguistics, and teaching methods and materials development. Students will design and create activities to support their learning and teaching. Students will have other activities at NILI and on campus.

Scholarships are available to assist with tuition costs only; the scholarship application is available on our website.

To find registration forms, scholarship application, or for more information, please go to http://pages.uoregon.edu/nwili/summer-institute and see the attached flyer.

AISES Offers Student Travel Scholarships to Leadership Summit

With Xerox Foundation funding, the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) will provide support to 10 students pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.  Students must be a full-time undergraduate student (or high school senior headed to higher education) at an accredited four-year college/university or a full-time student at a two-year college enrolled in a program leading to an academic degree.
 
The selected scholars will receive travel scholarships to attend the 2014 Leadership Summit, being held March 20-22, 2014, at the Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort and Spa at Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico, where they will be connected to others within the AISES student and professional leadership and gain leadership and personal development skill-building.  For more information about the Leadership Summit, please go to:   http://www.aises.org/news/events/2014-leadership-summit
 
Eligibility: Eligible students must be pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.  Students must be enrolled as full-time students in their field of study during the Spring 2014 semester.
 
Applicants MUST meet all of the following criteria: 
1.    Must have a 3.0 (on a 4.0 scale) or higher cumulative grade-point average (GPA).  Latest Official Transcripts (issued by your school registrar's office) will be required.
2.    Must be a full-time (12 credit hours or more) student at a two-year or four-year college or university, enrolled in a program leading to an academic degree (not a certificate) in a science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) field.
3.    Must be a member of an American Indian tribe or otherwise considered to be an American Indian by the tribe with which affiliation is claimed; or is Alaskan Native; or considered to be an Alaskan Native by an Alaskan Native group to which affiliation is claimed; Official Documentation identifying the student as such must be provided.
4.    Must be a member of AISES to apply.  To obtain an AISES membership go tohttp://www.aises.org/membership/

Applications can be found here: 
http://www.aises.org/news/events/2014-leadership-summit
 
For more information about this project or for details on how to apply for this project, please contact Tina M. Farrenkopf, Director of Programs, at 720-552-6123 or email her at tfarrenkopf@aises.org, no later than March 10, 2014.

    First Nations Elder Grant (March 14th deadline): FNDI expects to make between four and five awards at a maximum amount of $25,000 for projects addressing elderly nutrition.  More information and the online application are available at http://www.firstnations.org/grantmaking/2014nafsi.

• Wallace Center Food Hub Grant (March 30th deadline): The Wallace Center is accepting applications promoting food hubs.  Between 15 to 30 applications ranging from $10,000 to $75,000 are expected to be funded.
  
• ANA Grant (April 15th deadline): The Administration for Native Americans (ANA), which is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services is currently accepting applications in five different areas.  Food and agriculture projects probably best fit under the economic development related areas.  Applications, which are due April 15th, may be up to $500,000 and can last multiple years.  Here is a list of past grant awards.
• USDA Farm to School (April 30 deadline): USDA has announced the availability of farm to school grants.  There are three types of grants 1) planning, 2) implementation, and 3) support service.
• BIA Climate Change Adaptation Grants (April 30 deadline): The Bureau of Indian Affairs is accepting applications for projects aimed at addressing climate change impacts.  Send an email to climate-adaptation-grant-info@bia.gov for more information.

In The Light Of Justice

Walter Echo-Hawk
325 pages, softcover: 
$19.95.
Fulcrum Publishing, 2013.

It's unthinkable that kids in America would ever be allowed to play "slaves and masters," writes Walter Echo-Hawk, but we don't see anything wrong with Junior strapping on the trusty ol' cap-shooters for a game of "cowboys and Indians."

Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee tribal member and lawyer who has toiled for 35 years in federal Indian law, has written a provocative book that examines the tragic and continuing effects of colonial conquest and its resulting "settler" mindset. He does this without ever scolding his readers and succeeds in pointing a way toward eventual healing.

In the Light of Justice shines its own light onto often overlooked issues, explaining that what many whites think of as History – a bygone era of treaty-making, frontier warfare and taming the West – is, to most Indian people, actually Current Events.

James Anaya, a human rights investigator for the United Nations, agrees. In his foreward to the book, Anaya writes that, during a tour of Indian Country in the wake of the U.S. endorsement of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, he was struck "by … the deep, still open wounds" left by Manifest Destiny.

It's disturbing, Echo-Hawk notes, that former colonists who rebelled for the sake of freedom treated, and continue to treat, indigenous people in the manner of 500 years of Western European colonialism. The doctrines of conquest and discovery have not only unjustly destroyed indigenous economies and societies; they have harmed the land as well, by treating it solely as a resource to be exploited. And yet those doctrines are still cited by federal courts today.

Echo-Hawk devotes a chapter to the need for what he calls an American land ethic, something, he writes, that Aldo Leopold suggested as early as 1948. Without a new way to engage with the landscape, "the American people cannot fully mature from a nation of immigrants and settlers recovering from a rapacious frontier history of Manifest Destiny and stride toward a more just culture … and resolve to become more 'native' to place."

In 10 focused chapters, Echo-Hawk maps the way from the dark legacy of conquest to the light of justice. The "clothes of the conqueror," he concludes, do not well fit the American ideals of liberty and justice.

Indigenous Resistance To Energy Infrastructure & The Keystone XL Pipeline With Winona LaDuke, Lyana Monterrey, And Victor Menott

Today 6:00p to 9:00p La Peña Cultural Center-Berkeley, CA

Winona LaDuke
Honor the Earth
Native American author/activist will show a new short film of the Lakota and Anishinaabe peoples' horse rides
along routes of proposed pipelines that would cross North American prairies to carry Canadian crude oil/tar sands.
Lyana Monterrey
Pittsburg Ethics Council/Pittsburg Defense Council
Co-founder of local community coalitions will talk about the proposed WesPac project in Pittsburg, CA, a massive
crude oil storage and transfer facility to feed ultra-dirty oil to Bay Area's five refineries and export across the Pacific.
Victor Menotti
International Forum on Globalization
IFG Executive Director will share visualized data from the recent report, Billionaires' Carbon Bomb: The Koch Brothers
and the Keystone XL Pipeline, plus interactive mapping of the Kochs' influence network, known the Kochtopus.
Plus poetry and spoken word from Pittsburg Youth
Suggested Donation $10-$25... No one turned away for lack of funds.