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Presidential candidate and former Obama Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro released a comprehensive platform on Indigenous issues, the first detailed plan from a 2020 campaign. Castro will follow up on that announcement with a meet-and-greet on Meskwaki Settlement in Iowa Friday where he will discuss his blueprint for Indigenous communities and vision for the future of our nation. “For generations, Indigenous communities have been treated as second-class citizens rather...

A day after releasing the most comprehensive platform on Indigenous issues from any presidential candidate, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro visited the Meskwaki Indian Settlement in Tama, Iowa, on Friday. Castro has unique experience working with tribes across the country. He already knows many of the issues Native communities face from his service as Housing and Urban Development Secretary under President Obama. This was the driving force behind the planning and...

For Native nations and activists, the Green New Deal holds promise. Its commitment to principles of environmental justice is highly relevant to us, but can only work if articulated in a way that addresses our specific concerns. We might think of this as “Indigenizing” environmental justice and see the Green New Deal as decolonizing work. We need to imagine new frameworks for law and policy that articulate with specificity what Native people envision as a more just system, one that accurately...

Yvette Running Horse Collin’s recent dissertation may have rewritten every natural history book on the shelf. A Lakota/Nakota/Cheyenne scholar, Collin worked within the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Indigenous Studies program to synthesize fossil evidence, historical documents and oral history to present a compelling new story of the horse in the Americas. The horse was here well before the settlers. “We have calmly known we've always had the horse, way before the settlers came. The...

A new state law beginning July 1, which received unanimous support in the South Dakota House and Senate, is the first step in understanding the depth of the missing and murdered indigenous women issue in the state and begin to address it, supporters say. The law will require the state Division of Criminal Investigation to collect data on missing and murdered indigenous people, and create procedures and training for investigating cases involving women and children. The state can't fix a...

By Center for American Indian Health - Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, June 4, 2019. Nationally, teen pregnancy rates have declined by 67% since peaking in 1991. Yet significant disparities remain. Native American teens have the highest teen birth rate of any U.S. group and 4 in 10 Native American women begin childbearing in adolescence. Working closely with tribal partners, the Center for American Indian Health (Center) developed Respecting the Circle of Life, a...

By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, laist, June 20, 2019. For Native American college students, the road to earning a college degree can be a rocky, lonely pursuit. Only about 1,100 of the 280,000 students enrolled in the entire 10-campus University of California system in 2018 were Native Americans — that's 0.4 percent. And the overall Native American enrollment was only about 100 students more than 20 years ago; during that same span, the UC system added 100,000 students. The relatively few Native...

Gov. Gavin Newsom will formally apologize to California Native Americans through an executive order Tuesday for the state’s “dark history” of violence against indigenous people. “California Native American peoples suffered violence, discrimination and exploitation sanctioned by state government throughout its history,” Newsom said in a written statement. “We can never undo the wrongs inflicted on the peoples who have lived on this land that we now call California since time immemorial, but...

Science is only now catching up with what indigenous peoples have understood for millennia, according to indigenous rights activist, teacher, and author Sherri Mitchell. In this clip from her talk at the 2018 Drawdown Learn Conference, Mitchell explores the parallels between indigenous teachings and quantum entanglement—the concept that two particles remain tied together when they are no longer physically connected, or what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." "How many of you have...

Writer-Director Juan Antin’s latest film “Pachamama”, god willing, might just save the planet. The Argentinian director’s latest project illustrates a story of a young boy from the Andes growing up during the time the Incas were colonized by Spain. Even more importantly, as a piece of content that targets younger generations, it strikes up a conversation on how the actions of early colonizers mirror the ways in which we mistreat our planet today. “Pachamama” follows a 10-year-old boy from a...

For nearly a century, a massive mural by painter Victor Arnautoff titled “The Life of Washington” has lined the hallways of San Francisco’s George Washington High School . The mural “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy [and] oppression.” So said Washington High School’s Reflection and Action Group , an ad-hoc committee formed late last year and made up of Native Americans from the community, students, school employees, local artists and historians.