The University of Nevada-Reno women’s basketball team goes up against New Mexico State tonight in a game expected to be well-attended because of the extra festivities.

As Jim Krajewski of the Reno (Nev.) Gazette-Journal reports here, local tribes got flyers that allow each person with one to bring four other people to the game for free. And, he writes:

Tahnee Robinson

Also, the Pyramid Lake Junior/Senior High School dance group will hold a pregame honor ceremony for Pack guard Tahnee Robinson. The drum group Red Hoop will sing and the Pyramid Lake High dance group and Numu Tookwaus color guard will join Robinson for the honor song and dance.

“The idea is to honor Native Americans and do a Native American Awareness day. It was their idea to honor Tahnee,” [coach Jane] Albright said. “They feel like, for their culture, she’s kind of raised the bar on awareness.”

Robinson is a Native American (Eastern Shoshone, Pawnee, Cheyenne and Sioux) from Lander, Wyo., on the edge of the Wind River reservation. She’s the Pack’s leading scorer at 15.4 points per game.

See Tetona Dunlap’s blog post about Robinson, here.

Gwen Florio

Statues depicting the various clans within the Winnebago tribe, overlooking a housing development north of Winnebago, Neb., which was built on land purchased by the tribe. (AP photo/Nati Harnick)

The Associated Press just moved this report on tribes buying back their lands. In order to compile it, the AP had to submit a Freedom of Information Act to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The documents that reporter Timberly Ross received showed tribes have bought back nearly a million acres of their own land. This is the kind of reporting we like. Here’s the story in full:

By Timberly Ross of the Associated Press
OMAHA, Neb. – Native American tribes tired of waiting for the U.S. government to honor centuries-old treaties are buying back land where their ancestors lived and putting it in federal trust.

Native Americans say the purchases will help protect their culture and way of life by preserving burial grounds and areas where sacred rituals are held. They also provide land for farming, timber and other efforts to make the tribes self-sustaining.

Tribes put more than 840,000 acres — or roughly the equivalent of the state of Rhode Island — into trust from 1998 to 2007, according to information The Associated Press obtained from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs under the Freedom of Information Act.

Those buying back land include the Winnebago, who have put more than 700 acres in eastern Nebraska in federal trust in the past five years, and the Pawnee, who have 1,600 acres of trust land in Oklahoma. Land held in federal trust is exempt from local and state laws and taxes, but subject to most federal laws.

Three tribes have bought land around Bear Butte in South Dakota’s Black Hills to keep it from developers eager to cater to the bikers who roar into Sturgis every year for a raucous road rally. About 17 tribes from the Dakotas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana and Oklahoma still use the mountain for religious ceremonies.

Emily White Hat, a member of South Dakota’s Rosebud Sioux, said the struggle to protect the land is about “preservation of our culture, our way of life and our traditions.”

“All of it is connected,” White Hat said. “With your land, you have that relationship to the culture.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Larry EchoHawk (AP file photo)

“There are some dark chapters in this country when it comes to Indian affairs,” Echo-Hawk told Utah’s annual Native American Summit.

Utah is familiar territory for EchoHawk, who is a former Brigham Young University law professor. EchoHawk is also a member of Oklahoma’s Pawnee Nation and once represented Idaho’s Shoshone-Bannock tribes.

Maybe that’s why he spoke so openly to the group, speaking passionately about the history of atrocities against Indian people, including the Bear River Massacre in southern Idaho of nearly 500 peaceful Shoshone in 1863, the Salt Lake Tribune reports here.

Part of EchoHawk’s mission is to reverse that shameful legacy.

“The assistant secretary is the face of the federal government when it comes to Indian affairs,” he says. “I want only to do what is right and just for America and for Native people, the first Americans.”

Gwen Florio