Here’s the entire text of the AP story about today’s event at the National Museum of the American Indian in Manhattan.

NEW YORK (AP) – Members of America’s oldest Protestant church have apologized – for the first time ever – for the massacre and displacement of Native Americans 400 years ago.

The Collegiate Church – formerly the First Dutch Reform Church – and representatives of the Lenape tribe held a ceremony of reconciliation Friday in lower Manhattan. They exchanged wampum in a symbolic gesture.

The ceremony occurred on the spot where the First Dutch Reform Church once stood. It was known as the “company church” of the Dutch merchants whose trading post helped develop the city’s economic power.

It’s also where Broadway begins, the site of an Indian trail 400 years ago.

The Rev. Robert Chase told the Lenape: “We consumed your resources, dehumanized your people and disregarded your culture.”

(For more information on the Healing Turtle Island event, click here. )

Gwen Florio

Tags: buffalo post, Collegiate Church, First Dutch Reform Church, Lenape Tribe, Manhattan, Native American history, Native American news

A group of Innu chiefs and elders say their people’s rights have been severely curtailed since an agreement was signed between the government of Newfoundland and two Labrador communities.

So today, five chiefs and 60 elders from northern Quebec have traveled to Canada’s capital city to make their voices heard.

“The provincial boundaries are those of governments, not ours. Our rights in Labrador cannot be denied simply because we live west of an imaginary line that has no meaning to us”, says Chief McKenzie of Matimekush-Lac John, speaking on behalf of his fellow Chiefs – Raphael Picard of Pessamit, Georges-Ernest Grégoire of Uashat mak Maniutenam, Georges-C.S. Bâcon of Unamen Shipu and Jean-Charles Piétacho of Ekuanitshit.

The group says the government needs to remember its obligation to protect aboriginal rights, according to this report in Indigenous Peoples, Issues and Resources.

The group says the government has failed to take action on “severe encroachment” of their territorities over the years. After several pleas to the government, with no response, the group says it decided to take its case directly to Parliament.

Gwen Florio

Tags: Ekuanitshit, First Nations, Innu, Matimekush-Lac John, Pessamit, Sovereignty, Uashat mak Maniutenam, Unamen Shipu

California Rep. Joe Baca urges people to remember that today is the second national Native American Heritage Day.

“While we always remember the feast of Thanksgiving,” Baca writes here in Huffington Post, “we seldom pay homage to the Wampanoag hosts or recount what happened to them afterward.”

According to his piece, New York state became the first to establish such a day, in 1916!

As Baca adds, “Amid the Thanksgiving dinners, football, and shopping this week, lets take some time to recognize Native American Heritage Day. We must never take for granted the very first inhabitants of this continent – Native Americans, and their many contributions that have greatly enriched the United States.”

OK, so it’s not a congressional apology. But it’s something.

Gwen Florio

Tags: Native American Heritage Day, Rep. Joe Baca

Here’s the entire text of today’s Associated Press story:

PLYMOUTH (AP) – American Indian activists are planning to mark Thanksgiving by holding a “Day of Mourning” in Plymouth.

The United American Indians of New England say they have been holding the annual protest since 1970 to call attention to the disastrous consequences that eventually followed that first feast between European settlers and Native American tribes nearly 400 years ago.

The group’s co-leader Moonanum James, a Wampanoag Indian, said native people have no reason to celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims.

He called Plymouth Rock a monument to racism and genocide.

Organizers said participants in the protest planned to gather at about noon on Thursday by the statue of Massasoit on Cole’s Hill above the Plymouth waterfront.

Gwen Florio

Tags: buffalo post, Native American history, Native American news, Plymouth Rock, Thanksgiving, Wampanoag

Tags: buffalo post, Native American history, Native American news, Thanksgiving, Wampanoag

A.J. LongSoldier, who died shortly after being taken from Montana’s Hill County jail to a nearby hospital, died of natural causes, a coroner says.

“There was no foul play involved,” says Fergus County Coroner Dick Brown. He says it could be a month before more tests determine the cause of death, according to this AP story.

LongSoldier, 18, was a standout high school basketball player who led Hays-Lodgepole, on the Fort Peck Reservation in northeastern Montana, to a Class C state championship as a sophomore in 2007.

The story reports that The state Division of Criminal Investigation is investigating LongSoldier’s death, said division chief John Strandell, and a coroner’s inquest will be scheduled because LongSoldier died while in jail.

Blaine County Sheriff Glenn Heustis says LongSoldier didn’t say anything about feeling sick when he was booked into the jail last Thursday on a contempt of court warrant for a juvenile charge. But another inmate says LongSoldier complained the next day about feeling nauseous.

“He was kind of yelling for the guards,” Don Farrar tells the Great Falls Tribune. “He said he wasn’t feeling well, that he was losing color, that he couldn’t hold anything down.”

LongSoldier went to the hospital by ambulance late Sunday night and died Monday morning.

Gwen Florio

Tags: A.J. LongSoldier, buffalo post, Fort Peck Indian Reservation, Hays-Lodge Pole, Native American news

Tribes across the country are looking to build casinos far from their reservations and closer to cities with the sorts of population that can turn those casinos into moneymakers. And, the Obama administration is looking into loosening regulations that have kept them from doing just that, according to this Associated Press story.

Gambling opponents object, saying more casinos will bring more crime and other problems.

“These are all casinos coming to a highway ramp near you,” Cheryl Schmit, director of a nonprofit group that opposes Indian gambling, tells the AP’s Sudhin Thanawala.

Thanawala uses as an example the Guidiville Band of Pomo Indians, which wants to build a casino overlooking San Francisco Bay, more than 100 miles from its tribal lands.

Off-reservation casinos already exist in Milwaukee and Spokane, Wash.

The AP examined federal records and found that about a dozen tribes have filed applications to set up casinos on distant pieces of land.

Gwen Florio

Tags: buffalo post, Guidiville Band of Pomo Indians, Indian gaming, Native American news

Jack Gladstone brought his music and his culture to Glacier Wolfpack students in Kalispell, Mont., yesterday as part of the school’s First People’s Day event.

“It’s magnificent to sit and to visit with and also share with the freshman that are really the young pups, the young wolves, they will carry hopefully part of the message all through their time here and hopefully it will be resounding and hopefully it will become stronger as the years wear on here,” Gladstone tells KPAX television.

Not only did Gladstone, a nationally known singer and poet, sing for the students and tell them a bit of history and culture, he also taught them games such as double ball.

Freshman Madison Walters says the history lesson took hold.

“They took kids away from their home when they were ages 6 to 16 and brought them to a boarding school where they were forced not to speak their own language, and they had to speak English, and they couldn’t like do their own traditions anymore” she told us.

First People’s Day organizer Bonnie Streeter tells KPAX the event is important because “we need to preserve our culture, whether you’re Greek or Sioux or Polish, it doesn’t matter we need to preserve our cultures, and one of the ways we do that is by preserving language, and by listening to each others story and by appreciating it.”

Gwen Florio

Tags: Blackfeet Tribe, Glacier Wolfpack, Jack Gladstone

The George C. Page Museum in Los Angeles has a 9,000-year-old set of bones that apparently are the only human remains from the famous Rancho La Brea tar pits.

In this story, the Los Angeles Times calls it, “the skeleton the Page museum doesn’t want you to see.”

As the story says, the museum once displayed a cast of the skull, but removed it from its exhibition about five years ago.

But a former museum volunteer has published images of a facial reconstruction, something she says upsets museum officials because they fear the Chumash tribe will try to reclaim the bones for burial.

“Obviously they’re not completely happy about it,” says Melissa Cooper, of her sketch. “There are hints within the skull that she may have had Native American features. You can tell by the way the nose was pointed and the depth of her eyes. Based on the skull, she had Asian features which does coincide with Native Americans.”

Museum officials deny her specific claims, saying only that they approved her reconstruction with the provision that it wouldn’t be published or distributed.

John Harris, the museum’s chief curator, tells the Times’ David Ng that the museum is in compliance with regulations pertaining to Native American artifacts.

Gwen Florio

Tags: buffalo post, Chumash Tribe, George C. Page Museum, La Brea Woman, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, Native American news