Juneau – Earlier Wednesday, Rep. Dean Westlake (D-Kotzebue) introduced a bill to establish the second Monday in October as an annual holiday in Alaska called “Indigenous Peoples Day.” “I’d like to bring Alaska to the forefront in showing support for Native peoples and cultures. We have lagged behind our neighbors in Canada in celebrating […]
A new series of ethnobotany films produced by filmmaker Sarah Betcher explores traditional Alaskan indigenous uses of wild plants for food, medicine and construction materials. The “Ties to Alaska’s Wild Plants” project was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation to Betcher and principle investigator Steffi Ickert-Bond, the Herbarium curator at the University […]
Over the last three decades, street gangs have seeped into rural areas — including Native reservations, where youth gang involvement has been steadily rising since the 1990s. In a recently published study, UNL sociology graduate student Dane Hautala examined several risk factors for future gang involvement among Native youth. Using longitudinal data collected from 646 […]