The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a case involving the right of the Kaltag Nation of Alaska to have its tribal court decide cases involving children. The case in question involved a Kaltag child who was being abused and neglected by her parents. After hearing the facts, the Tribal Court ordered the child to be removed from her parents and gave permanent custody of the girl to another tribal family.
Jessie little doe Baird, Mashpee Wampanoag tribal citizen and an advisor and partner to Cultural Survival’s Endangered Languages Program, was honored today with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, popularly known as a “genius grant” for her extraordinary efforts to revive Wampanoag as a spoken language after it disappeared 150 years ago.
Attendees at the National Indian Education Association's annual convention and language revitalization forum will be treated to film screenings featuring two of Cultural Survival's partner and advisor Native language programs--the Northern Arapaho Tribe's immersion schools, the Arapaho Language Lodges on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, and the Wampanoag Nation's Wopanaak Language Reclamation Project (WLRP) in Massachusetts.
The Cultural Survival Endangered Languages program is working with the Sauk Language Department in Stroud, Oklahoma, and the Meskwaki Historic Preservation Department in Tama, Iowa, to set up local archives and mentoring opportunities for language learners to work with the traditional stories and other cultural and linguistic knowledge contained within the 27,000 page document collection written by first-language Meskwaki speakers in the early 1900s.
September 13th marks the third anniversary of the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the UN General Assembly. The US State Department’s formal review of the declaration will end in October. The department has asked Native American tribal leaders to write letters and give feedback about what the declaration means to their people. Now is the time to take action and let the Obama administration know why this document is so important to Native peoples in the US.
Educators from the Cherokee, Muckleshoot, Native Hawaiian, Ojibwe, and other tribal language programs across Indian Country met for two days this week in the Senate Dirksen Building and at the U.S. Department of Education to press federal officials to uphold provisions in the 1990 Native American Languages Act (NALA) that have been undermined by No Child Left Behind—particularly, testing requirements that penalize Native language schools and teachers for providing students with Indigenous language instruction across all subject areas.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security initially refused to allow the Iroquois Nationals Lacross Team to travel to England for the World Lacrosse Championships using their Haudenosaunee passports. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton finally granted the team a "one-time-only waiver" allowing them to make the trip without US passports. However, the United Kindgom refuses to grant them visas to enter the country.
Next week on July 13 and 14, the National Alliance to Save Native Languages will hold the 4th annual National Native Language Revitalization Summit in Washington, D.C.
Tuesday morning at 8:45 a.m. summit attendees will convene in Room 138 of the U.S. Senate Dirksen Building.
Cultural Survival will participate in the 4th annual National Native Language Revitalization Summit in Washington, D.C. July 13-14 organized by the National Alliance to Save Native Languages. Sponsored by the National Congress of American Indians, the National Indian Education Association, and the National Indian Gaming Association, the event will include a keynote address by a newly appointed member of the Commission on U.S. Presidential Scholars, Colin Kippen.
June 9, 2010
Ms. Kathy Cloninger, CEO
Girl Scouts of the United States
420 5th Avenue
New York, NY 10018-2798
Dear Ms. Cloninger:
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that we are headquartered on Massachusett land, in Cambridge, MA, and we thank the past, current, and future Indigenous stewards of this territory.
