SKC basketball player shows his skills
COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho – Bryce Kirk from Salish Kootenai College had one of those nights basketball players dream about during a tournament at North Idaho College. Kirk, Assiniboine/Sioux from Poplar on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana, hit 12 three-point shots and scored 40 points in a losing effort to the host NIC Cardinals.
”They just kept dropping, so I kept shooting. I think I hit seven in the second half. I couldn’t hardly believe it,” he commented after the game. ”The crowd was great! It was fun!”
Kirk, a center, hit more than 50 percent of his three-point attempts, many of them from well beyond the arc out in NBA range.
SKC coach Zachary Camel said Kirk wasn’t the first player to hit that many ”threes” for him. ”If somebody’s hot, you just keep going to him. You also have to have someone get him the ball in the right spot, too.”
Kirk returned the second night with another excellent outing, scoring 25 points in a win over a North Idaho All-Star team.
University of Idaho professor named Diversity Fellow
MOSCOW, Idaho – Rebecca Tallent, of Cherokee heritage, a journalism and mass media professor at the University of Idaho, has been named a Diversity Leadership Fellow by the Society of Professional Journalists.
”Native Americans come out of a storytelling tradition. Journalism is a natural fit,” Tallent commented in a release.
Tallent worked and taught at a variety of jobs in Oklahoma before coming to Idaho a year ago. It was her background of working with American Indians and American Indian journalism that brought her to the SPJ’s attention.
Her yearlong fellowship will be spent working with University of Idaho students under the mentoring of Debora Wenger, a professor of journalism at Virginia Commonwealth University. ”The goal of diversity in journalism is to make our reporting better, to tell our stories better and to present the truth. If you don’t bring people with diverse backgrounds … you might miss out on the truth of the story,” Wenger said in a release.
Tallent explained: ”It isn’t just that you want to see someone that looks like you working in the field. It is that you want to know someone is there who understands your culture. I have walked down that path. I can help them navigate. My door is always open.”
Spokane Tribe makes large land purchase
WELLPINIT, Wash. – A goal of the Spokane Tribe is to own 100 percent of the land within its reservation. A recent large acquisition brings that goal considerably closer.
The tribe purchased 3,926 acres from Forest Capital Partners, a private forest landowner. Nearly 2,000 of those acres is considered critical big game winter range. Bonneville Power Administration is providing funding for the acquisition as part of its wildlife mitigation efforts.
Tribal Chairman Richard Sherwood commented in a release: ”We appreciate Forest Capital’s willingness to work with the tribe in meeting our goals of not only protecting our wildlife habitat, but also the sovereignty of the Spokane Tribe of Indians.”
Rudy Peone, director of the Department of Natural Resources for the tribe, made similar comments in a release, saying the purchase ”will help the tribe to continue on its path of protecting and enhancing its wildlife habitat.”
Greg Delwiche, vice president of Environment, Fish and Wildlife at BPA, elaborated further in the release. ”This collaborative project fits perfectly with BPA’s commitment to restore or protect critical habitat that helps preserve the Pacific Northwest as the special place that it is. So far, BPA has protected more than 300,000 acres across the Northwest through the agency’s mitigation efforts.”
Tribe, team enter cooperate sponsorship
SPOKANE, Wash. – The Spokane Tribe and the Spokane Shock, a professional indoor football team, have expanded a partnership that began earlier when team members and coaches traveled to the reservation to conduct football training workshops. The Spokane Shock announced in mid-November that they have joined with the Spokane Tribe in a three-year corporate sponsorship with the team.
This partnership has provided the tribe with the naming rights to the field, which will be called ”Spokane Tribe Field at the Spokane Arena.” Many events are planned in the future, but the first involved the two entities teaming up to support an annual Christmas Wish Drive to provide needy families in the area with goods and services during the holiday season.
Jamie SiJohn, tribal spokesman, was quoted on www.our sportscentral.com as saying, ”The Spokane Tribe is proud to partner with such a quality organization as Shock Football. The team and its administration hold similar family goals as the Spokane Tribe and we believe this is a win-win partnership.”
