Seattle’s South Lake Union may be home to Facebook, Google, and Amazon, but now, thanks to Native rights activists, it will once again be home to hand-carved canoes, too. For more than a hundred years, Native culture has been absent from the land surrounding Lake Union, replaced by the offices of tech giants. Instead of canoes, sightseeing float planes and yachts now skim across its surface. But thanks to the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation, hand-carved canoes from Coast Salish tribes will soon glide silently again through the waters of Lake Union. They will carry Native crews, called “canoe families,” binding them together into one powerful motor, an engine of human hearts.
The New Deadly Drug ‘Tranq’ Hits Indian Country. The drug, a powerful animal tranquilizer, is often added to heroin and fentanyl sold on the street. Overdoses involving the deadly combination of fentanyl and tranq have skyrocketed in the past two years, according to data released last month by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC. According to the CDC, the share of fatal opioid overdoses in which tranq was detected almost quadrupled from January 2019 to June 2022. Xylazine has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in animals and is not meant for human consumption.
Those are your headlines at this hour. I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI News center.