WASHINGTON – In the fall of 1621, English settlers at Plymouth marked their first harvest and began stockpiling food for the winter: cod, bass and other fish, venison, wild turkey and duck that could dried or salted to supplement plentiful Indian corn. Tisquantum, commonly known as Squanto, was a member of the Patuxet band of the […]
WASHINGTON — Each year on the last Thursday of November, families in the United States gather to celebrate Thanksgiving. It was originally intended as a day of prayer and gratitude — not just for good harvests but for a leader’s good health or success in battle. Today, the holiday revolves around a sentimentalized retelling of the […]
WASHINGTON — In December 1900, John Wesley Powell received “the most unusual Christmas present of any person in the United States, if not in the world,” reported the Chicago Tribune. The gift for this first director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology was a sealskin sack containing the mummified remains of an Alaska Native. The […]
WASHINGTON — Last month, Native Alaskans on Little Diomede Island awoke to see their city office collapsing into the community school next door. For the Ingalikmiut people [Inupiat] in the Bering Strait, halfway between Siberia and the Alaska mainland, this was the latest crushing evidence of the impact of climate change in the Arctic. “Looking at […]