Native Americans

American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions hosts its inaugural week of action to highlight the epidemic of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and People (MMIWP).

As the Trump administration targets the Smithsonian Institute for "divisive narratives" and "improper ideology," it got us thinking about how we preserve our history and everything that builds it, like language. So we're revisiting an episode from last year from the Lakota Nation in South Dakota over language — who preserves it, who has the right to the stories told in it, and who (literally) owns it.

The Sunrise Dance is a four-day coming-of-age ceremony — a significant and highly spiritual event for the young lady and the Apache community.

There’s a 30-acre site in Central Texas that has yielded over 2.6 million artifacts about the early human presence in the Americas. The Gault Archaeological dig is rewriting the history and our understanding of the earliest people who inhabited Texas. But saving this site from exploitation has been a fight. We’ll hear about the documentary “The Stones are Speaking.”

An event on Wednesday, Feb. 19, at La Zona promises indigenous art, body painting and more. La Zona, at 337 West Commerce, often hosts themed pop-up exhibitions which sometimes involve music or fashion, but always involve art.

The filmmakers of this emotionally powerful documentary followed Delwin Fiddler Jr. as he returned home to South Dakota after years in Philadelphia — then kept revisiting him for more than a decade.

The lawsuit brought by a Native American group opposes the city's restoration efforts, which include the removal of trees and subsequent displacement of birds from natural habitats — all features of tribal spiritual rituals protected by a 2021 state constitutional amendment.

The celebration begins on Saturday at 10 a.m.

Today's journey begins with flute music from R. Carlos Nakai, born into the Navajo nation. His song echoes the souls of Nakai's ancestors as they beat out foot paths to the south, establishing trade routes connecting the Navajo nation with the Huichol of northwestern Mexico. Trade continued all the way to the great Aztec city which we know today as Mexico City. Gabriela Ortiz speaks of discovering Huichol chant which she then integrated into her modern orchestral score, “Kauyumari.”