Welcome

It is good you've come to visit us. Please feel free to browse the archives as there is a lot of information posted here. To view one of the videos simply click on the screen and the video will automatically begin. Be sure to post comments on anything which speaks to you. Thank you for stopping by.

Featured Art - Cankpe Opi

Featured Art - Cankpe Opi
Frank Howell

Featured Video - Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Thursday, July 5, 2007

The Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe

The Haliwa-Saponi reside primarily in Halifax, Warren and adjoining Counties in North Carolina. The majority of the 3,800 enrolled members live in a community known as “The Meadows”. This tribal community was established in the mid 1700’s.

The Haliwa-Saponi trace their ancestry to the Saponi and Nansemond Indians. Bands and families of other allied tribes merged with the Saponi and Nansemond during the Colonial period.

The Haliwa-Saponi tribe spent the late 1800’s fighting for separate schools. In 1882 Bethlehem School was established. The school was state supported and 98% Indian. However, in 1957 the tribe was successful in obtaining its own school. The Haliwa Indian School was established and the first year had enrollment of more than 200. This school, established exclusively for the Haliwa-Saponi Indians, was the only non-reservation, tribally supported Indian School in North Carolina. In 1959 it became part of the Warren County Board of Education and in 1969 was closed to desegregation.

The Haliwa-Saponi have always been conscious of retaining their Indian culture. The tribe’s annual Powwow has been rated one of the largest in the state. It is the biggest single homecoming event for the tribe, but it is even more important as a political and social event. Tribal members are brought into contact with leaders of other tribes. Over the years members of tribes throughout the United States and Canada have participated in the Haliwa-Saponi Powwow.

The Tribe was recognized by the State of NC in 1965. The Tribe is governed by the Haliwa-Saponi Tribal Council. Since 1979, the tribe has sought federal recognition through the federal acknowledgement process.

Check out their website here: http://www.haliwa-saponi.com/

Quotes

"The white man says, there is freedom and justice for all. We have had "freedom and justice," and that is why we have been almost exterminated. We shall not forget this." -

1927 Grand Council American Indians

Today in history...

1831: N. William Colquhoun is appointed Special Agent to the Choctaws, by Secretary of War, Lewis Cass. Colquhoun is ordered to go to the Choctaw Nation and consult with their leaders about their removal to Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma).

1871: Arrested for murdering the wagon drivers in the raid on May 18th, Kiowas Satanta and Big Tree go on trial in Jacksboro, in north-central Texas, near Fort Richardson. They are found guilty after three days of testimony. Satanta tells the court, "If you let me go, I will withdrawn my warriors from Tehanna, but if you kill me, it will be a spark on the prairie. Make big fire-burn heap." Although sentenced to be hanged, the Texas Governor, fearing a Kiowa uprising, decides to commute the sentences to life in a Texas prison. Eventually, Big Tree and Satanta are freed. Later, Satanta is returned to prison, where he commits suicide by jumping off a prison balcony on October 11, 1874.

Fallon Tribal Police Officer Killed in Early Morning Auto Accident

STILLWATER RESERVATION

By: Greg Knight

Tragedy has befallen the members of a Northern Nevada Indian Tribe this Fourth of July.

Tribal officer Adam Menuez with the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribal Police died in a car accident near the Stillwater Reservation. The accident happened around 5 a.m. Wednesday morning near Rio Vista and Cemetery Road.

Menuez was killed when his police vehicle rolled over enroute to a medical emergency on the reservation.

Menuez was a veteran of U.S. Army and had served tours in Afghanistan during the war on terror.

The cause of the accident is unknown and is under investigation by the Nevada Highway Patrol.

Do you know...

Carter Revard, part Osage on his father's side, was given his Osage name in 1952 in Pawhuska, the Agency town where he was born, by his grandmother, Mrs. Josephine Jump. He grew up in the Buck Creek Valley twenty miles east of Pawhuska, working in the hay and harvest fields, training greyhounds, and graduating as did his six brothers and sisters from Buck Creek School (one room, eight grades), where he and his twin sister did the janitoring in their eighth grade year. He graduated from Bartlesville College High, winning a radio quiz scholarship to the University of Tulsa, where he took a B.A. in 1952. He then took a B.A. from Oxford University with the help of a Rhodes Scholarship and support from Professor Franklin Eikenberry of the University of Tulsa, who also helped him go on to a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1959. Upon receiving his degree, Carter taught at Amherst College. Since 1961 he has taught at Washington University, St. Louis, and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Tulsa and University of Oklahoma. His scholarly work has been in medieval English literature [manuscripts, patrons, social contexts], linguistics, and American Indian literature. Two collections of his poems have been published by Point Riders Press in Oklahoma: Ponca War Dancers (1980) and Cowboys and Indians Christmas Shopping (1992). More recently, An Eagle Nation and Family Matters, Tribal Affairs have been published by the University of Arizona Press.

Among the organizations to which Carter belongs are the Modern Language Association, the American Indian Center of St. Louis, where he was a board member in 1980-81 and 1984, secretary, 1986-90, and president, 1990--, the Association for Studies in American Indian Literature, the River Styx Literary Organization, the Association of American Rhodes Scholars, the University of Tulsa Board of Visitors, the St. Louis Gourd Dancers and Phi Beta Kappa.

Carter is the 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award winner from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. The Spring 2003 issue of the journal SAIL (Studies in American Indian Literatures) was devoted to Carter's work. In 2000, Carter was named Writer of the year - Autobiography for Family Matters, Tribal Affairs by the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers. In 2002, he was a Finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award in the Non-Fiction category for Winning the Dust Bowl. In 1994 Carter's book Eagle Nation was the winner of the Oklahoma Book Award in the Poetry category. Family Matters, Tribal Affairs was a finalist in the non-fiction category for the Oklahoma Book Award in 1999.

Carter received a Rhodes Scholarship in 1952. His Osage name, Nompewathe, was given to him in the same year. In 1966 he was named one of the Outstanding Young Men in America. He has received travel grants from the ACLS and the NEH, a Neil Ker Fellowship from the British Academy, a residency from the Millay Colony for the Arts in 1997, and in 1998, he had a residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH.

Earthworks book series presents poetry and prose

by: Stephanie Woodard

CAMBRIDGE, England - The power of storytelling permeates Earthworks, a two-year-old paperback book series featuring American Indian writers from Salt Publishing, a British firm. The recent arrival in bookstores of the 2006 offerings brings the number of published volumes to 13, with more to come in the years ahead, according to series editor Janet McAdams, Alabama Creek, a poet and a faculty member at Kenyon College.

On the cover of one of the books - Carter Revard's ''How the Songs Come Down'' - an endorsement from revered Acoma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz emphasizes the importance of the telling of tales and their function as lifelines from the past to the present. Ortiz describes Revard's work as ''fine, fine poetry, of course, but they're stories too [that] sustain us and our land, culture and community.''

In Revard's poems, the past may be a truly ancient one. With a conversational tone that makes his erudition seem effortless, Revard ranges over vast territory and time. A geode sliced in two, polished and used to support books on a shelf inspires verses that circle from the moment of the rock's creation through geologic eons to the present day and thence back to creation. The birth of an individual being and the universe conflate: ''the Word, made slowly/slowly, in-/to Stone.''

In ''The Fork-in-the-Road Indian Poetry Store,'' by Phillip Carroll Morgan, Choctaw/Chickasaw, the crops he grows on his farm are the repository of life-saving narratives. Morgan writes: ''Yes they and the vine beans/and the squash the pumpkins/and the corn/tell me these stories/which they remember/and cannot forget.'' By describing the plants that the indigenous people of this hemisphere have bred for millennia as a source of both physical and cultural sustenance, Morgan expresses a belief held by many Native communities.

Want to know more? Click here: http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096415294

Scholars OK Native American and indigenous studies association

NORMAN, Okla. - Earlier this year, a small group of scholars scheduled three meetings over the next three years to probe the level of interest, if any, in creating an independent Native American and indigenous studies association. The idea was so enthusiastically embraced by the 300-plus participants in the first of those three meetings that the group was sent off with a mandate to form the association by the next event.

That first meeting, held May 3 - 5 and called ''What's Next for Native American and Indigenous Studies,'' was hosted by the University of Oklahoma Native American Studies Department. More than 300 scholars attended from across the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India, Hong Kong, Great Britain and Switzerland.

Robert Warrior, Osage, sparked the idea two years ago for an academic association that would support the work of scholars in the field.

Warrior is the Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor at the University of Oklahoma, where he teaches in Native American Studies and English.

Warrior's idea generated a steering committee that includes Ines Hernandez-Avila, University of California - Davis; J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Wesleyan University; K. Tsianina Lomawaima, University of Arizona; Jean O'Brien, University of Minnesota; and Jace Weaver, University of Georgia.

There's more here: http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096415301