Author: ilpc

Indian Health Care Improvement Act Up For Vote in U.S. Senate

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Sent to us by Jerilyn Church, Executive Director of the American Indian Health & Family Services of Southeastern MI, Inc.:

Please call your respective United States Senator to ask him or her to vote YES on S. 1200, the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, which according to the Senate Calendar will come up for consideration on Tuesday, January 22. It is especially important for callers to urge their senators to also vote NO on any Urban Indian Health Amendments, which would eliminate funding for urban clinics.

The National Council for Urban Indian Health has disseminated an Urban Indian Health one-pager for callers to use when contacting their Senators.

Odawa language course makes its way into Harbor Springs’ curriculum

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By Christina Rohn News-Review Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 16, 2008 9:32 AM EST

A groundbreaking new course is being offered at Harbor Springs High School — Anishinaabemowin, the native language of Odawa Indians. The class, which is a collaboration between the Little Traverse Bay Bands (LTBB) of Odawa Indians and Harbor Springs Public Schools, began in September 2007 — the beginning of the current school year.

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Thanks

ilpc

To Rob J. Peters at www.blog.yahbayrising.com for adding us to his blog role and writing nice things about us. We’ll do the same. Rob writes about his tribe, the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, and other Native issues.

Sherman Alexie wins National Book Award

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From the Seattle Times:

Seattle’s Alexie wins the National Book Award

By Mary Ann Gwinn
Seattle Times book editor

Seattle author Sherman Alexie has won the National Book Award for his highly autobiographical novel for young people, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.”

Alexie got the news Wednesday night at the awards ceremony in New York. He won for best book in the young people’s literature category. In his acceptance speech, Alexie, an author of 19 books of fiction, poetry and essays, quipped: “Wow … I obviously should have been writing YA (young adult) all along.”

He credited Alex Kuo, a creative-writing teacher at Washington State University who gave him an anthology of Native American writing. It helped persuade him to become a writer: “I had never read words written by a Native American. The first one was a poem about frying baloney … I grew up eating fried baloney. The other was a poem by Adrian Lewis, and the poem had the line, ‘Oh, Uncle Adrian, I’m in the reservation of my mind.’ I knew right then when I read that line that I wanted to be a writer. It’s been a gorgeous and magnificent and lonely 20 years since then.”

The article continues here.

New Blog Design

ilpc1 Comment

We’ve redesigned the look of Turtle Talk already, and wanted to note that the artwork at the top of the page is part of a larger piece done for the Indigenous Law and Policy Center by Zoey Woods-Salomon. Zoey is an citizen of the Ottawa Nation, Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve on Manitoulin Island, ON, Canada. Her longer biography is here, which includes links to selected pieces of her work.

In this small strip of the larger work, the three suns represent the People of the Three Fires, and the twelve rays represent the twelve federally recognized tribes in Michigan.