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RAPID CITY, S.D. – Every day after work, Chance White Eagle and his father Chris walked around Rapid City’s northside looking for Shamar Bennett, a man wanted in connection with the death of Chance’s 7-week-old daughter Aiko Storm White Eagle on Nov. 19, 2022.

In the months since Aiko’s death, her family has continued to fight for justice and for answers to what happened to the Cheyenne River Lakota infant.

Traveling up and down streets, across apartment complexes, beside Rapid Creek and all over Memorial Park all under the unforgiving South Dakota summer sun – the White Eagle family wasn’t going to go one more day without justice.

When a warrant for murder suspect Shamar Bennett’s arrest was posted on Aug. 14, the White Eagle family finally had the opportunity to work alongside law enforcement and hunt for Bennett. After one year and 10 months, police believed they had identified her killers. READ MORE — Amelia Schafer, ICT + Rapid City Journal

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Chante’ Reddest began making videos on TikTok to educate people about Dakota history in February 2021. He eventually began creating inspirational content and videos on folklore, quickly hitting one million followers.

“My whole motto, my whole thing, even before I first started was to inspire the next generation and to be you, be real. That was my whole message that led me this far because I never strayed away from that path that was set in the beginning,” he said.

Reddest, 23, said he sees his social media reach as a blessing and is aware that he is representing the Oceti Sakowin people and Indian Country.

“It happened so quickly for me. I didn’t really get to process it. I was just always posting, making something new. It was kind of like a really quick turn around because I think it was not even less than a year that I got to a million in that year,” he said. READ MORE — Kalle Benallie, ICT

OKLAHOMA CITY – A year after receiving a kidney from a stranger on TikTok, Cherokee Nation citizen Katie Hallum is on the beat covering Indigenous affairs for KOSU, an NPR affiliate in Oklahoma City.

“I love my job at KOSU,” the 22-year-old said. “They’re so nice. My coworkers are so great.”

Born in Tahlequah, Hallum attended Sequoyah High School, but during her senior year was diagnosed with a rare kidney disease called IgA nephropathy.

“It was just a random occurrence,” she said. “It’s incredibly rare, but it does happen in pretty high amounts within Asian and Native populations.” READ MORE — Cherokee Phoenix

As a child, Joshua Olsen always paid attention to foreign languages. When strangers would speak Spanish, or Punjabi, or any other language native to their country, he’d think: “I only have English — and I know that English was forced on the Native people.”

Olsen is a member of the Nooksack Tribe, whose language is Lhéchelesem, one of many Indigenous languages spoken in the Americas prior to European colonization. But when its last native speaker passed away in 1977, Lhéchelesem was classified as extinct, so Olsen didn’t hear it growing up.

This isn’t an uncommon phenomenon: Of the roughly 6,000 Indigenous languages spoken worldwide according to the U.N., one dies every two weeks. And in the U.S., a recently released report from the Interior Department shows that, from 1871 to 1969, the country spent $23 billion (adjusted for inflation) on the Indian boarding school system — forcibly assimilating Indigenous children into white culture and forbidding them from speaking their native language. READ MORE — Cascadia Daily News

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More than a hundred people gathered under a big-top tent to hear Gerard Baker, a cultural leader of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, speak of the societal significance of Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site. Baker, the highest-ranking American Indian in National Park Service history, took his first permanent job as a park ranger at the historic town site near Stanton, N.D., in 1979. It would be just one step in a career that would help change the national interpretation of Native history.

Baker’s talk was the keynote in a daylong celebration of the historic site’s 50th anniversary on Saturday. In the works for over a year, the event featured live performances, stories from elders and educational and cultural sessions that bridged the past with the present. In addition, American Legion Auxiliary units and the Young Hawk Bear American Legion Post #253 honor guard from the Fort Berthold Reservation arrived to support veterans and their families.

Meanwhile, Baker discussed the history of the park and the importance of its location. Descendents of these lands still inhabit territories far beyond what most people think, he emphasized. “Our home goes far beyond to the south, to the north, to the east and to the west,” he said. “Our people owned and had those territories when they were here. And I’m willing to tell you right now that those people are still here.” READ MORE — Buffalo’s Fire

The United States Forest Service has begun considering options for what to do with a 40-year-old tunnel built at Spirit Lake in the aftermath of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.

The tunnel—quite literally constructed on shaky ground—is the only thing keeping downstream communities safe from a potentially catastrophic flood from Spirit Lake, located just north of Mount St. Helens.

In 1985, the Army Corps of Engineers built a 1.6-mile-long tunnel through a nearby ridge to let the lake drain into the North Fork Toutle River.

The ridge itself is geologically active, filled with small faults and “shear zones” that have exerted pressures on the tunnel over the last four decades, requiring extensive repairs. In 2018, a report determined that the tunnel needed millions of dollars worth of repairs to avoid failure. READ MORE — Columbia Insight

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