We’re going to keep updating here as Samantha Gross of the Associated Press follows this developing story:

NEW YORK (AP) — An American Indian lacrosse team that refuses to accept U.S. passports will not be allowed entry into England for the world championship of the sport the Iroquois helped invent, the British government said Wednesday.

The Iroquois Nationals team won’t be attending the world championship in Manchester unless the British government reverses its decision, said Tonya Gonnella Frichner, a lawyer for the team.

“They’re telling us: ‘Go get U.S. passports or Canadian passports,’” Frichner said Wednesday shortly after getting the news. “It’s pretty devastating.”

The team’s 23 players — who are all eligible for passports issued by those nations — say that accepting them would be a strike against their identity.

In a statement, the U.K. Borders Agency said: “Like all those seeking entry into the U.K., they must present a document that we recognise as valid to enable us to complete our immigration and other checks.”

The British government’s decision was announced hours after the U.S. cleared the team for travel on a one-time waiver at the behest of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

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The latest from Samantha Gross of the Associated Press:

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. government on Wednesday agreed to let a Native American lacrosse team travel to England for a tournament under Iroquois Confederacy passports, but their travel plans were still on hold because they lacked visas from Britain and because some players needed clearance from Canada.

The 23-member Iroquois team was unlikely to make a Wednesday afternoon flight from Kennedy Airport or Thursday’s first game of the Lacrosse World Championships in Manchester, England, said Oren Lyons, the team chairman and a chief of the Onondaga Nation. Nine team members are Canadian-born and still need Canadian waivers, and talks continued with British officials over visa requirements, team officials said.

“This has not been the best preparation for a world tournament,” Lyons said.

The team’s bus pulled up to an international terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport Wednesday afternoon, then pulled away shortly afterward; the team never got off.

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Child death in foster care causes First Nations outcry
Twice in six months, children from the Sturgeon Lake First Nation in Saskatchewan have died in foster care under suspicious circumstances. The most recent case, that of a 22-month-old child, has prompted calls for a public inquiry, according to this CBC report. The little boy, Evander Lee Daniels, drowned in a bathtub and also had been scalded, according to this earlier CBC piece. watch a video, here.

Some Wind River Reservation residents told to seek high ground during floods
Even though floodwaters are receding in central Wyoming, residents in the Wind River Indian Reservation community of Sharp Nose are being told to seek higher ground because of rain and snow last night. With snow falling at about an inch an hour, authorities feared more flooding along the Wind River, according to the Casper (Wyo.) Star Tribune, here.

New dorm goes up at Crazy Horse Memorial
The nearly-completed Crazy Horse Student Living and Learning Center was open to the public yesterday. The $2.5 million dorm will house the Summer University Program at Crazy Horse Memorial, sanctioned by the University of South Dakota’s Department of American Indian Studies, according to this Rapid City (S.D.) Journal story by Tyler Jerke.

Cape Wind opponents see parallels with gulf oil catastrophe
Indian Country Today’s Gale Courey Toensing wrote here last week about the massive wind-power project off the coast of Massachusetts, which is vehemently opposed by the Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag nations. Opponents say the mitigation opposed for the Cape Wind project is akin to the safety measures that so badly failed on the BP rig now spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Fort Niagara adds Native American interpreters for truer history lesson
Every summer, Fort Niagara in New York hires history lovers and actors from Niagara University to portray characters who might have populated the region, and to explain its history to tourists. This year, those history interpreters include Jordan Smith, a Niagara Falls Native American educator, in the role of a Mohawk Indian, and Brenda Patterson, who is Tuscaroran and plays the role of a Seneca woman. The Mohawk and Seneca tribes are part of the Iroquois Confederacy. Read more here in the Niagara Gazette.

Gwen Florio

Here‘s how the New York Times describes the new graphic novel, “Journey into Mohawk Country,” told through the point of view of white adventurer Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert.

The graphic novel “Journey into Mohawk Country,” by the artist George O’Connor, tells the tale of a 23-year old surgeon and adventurer, Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, who was charged with forging new trade relationships for the Dutch colony. In the winter of 1634, he and two friends set off from Fort Orange, in present-day Albany, north to Iroquois country, where the Mohawk tribe controlled the most important trade routes in the region. Van den Bogaert, a likely ancestor of Humphrey Bogart, chronicled the journey in a diary that was later translated by Charles Gehring, the director of the New Netherland Project at the New York State library.

If you go to the site, you can click and drag your way through an excerpt of the novel. It’ll be interesting to see how the Mohawk people are portrayed.

Gwen Florio

File this in the “There’s a First Time for Everything” category – as in, there’s a first time that Buffalo Post links to Coin News.

That’s the source of this story about the 2010 theme for the U.S. Mint’s 2010 Native American coin.

Starting January, the mint will issue the “Government – The Great Tree of Piece coin.”

All the $1 coins feature Sacajawea on the front, but are required by law to feature a
different reverse design each year with “images celebrating the important contributions made by Indian tribes and individual Native Americans to the development of the United States and the history of the United States.”

The 2010 design shows a Hiawatha Belt with five arrows bound together, signifiying the creation of the Haudenosaunee, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy – the Onondaga, Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga and Seneca nations.

The confederacy, in present-day New York and surroundings, united the tribes around the 16th century.

The coin’s 2009 design features a Native American woman planting seeds in a field of corn, beans and squash. The scene represents the Three Sisters method of planting.

Gwen Florio

Through the wonders of the Intra-Web comes this Bangkok Post story about the Haudenosaunee team that competed in the women’s lacrosse World Cup in Prague, which was won Saturday by six-time champion Team USA.

The team, which will celebrate its first birthday in August, isn’t as well known as its men’s counterpart, the Iroqois Nationals, which has played at four World Cups. But it sounds like that won’t be the case for long.

“We have recognized ourselves as a sovereign nation – we have never been conquered, we have never been defeated,” said Kathy Smith, chairwoman of the Haudenosaunee Nation Women’s Lacrosse Board.

After first gaining permission from the tribes, the Haudenosaunee team joined the International Federation of Women’s Lacrosse last year as that group’s 11th member nation. We’ll be cheering them on in the next World Cup competition.

Gwen Florio