In a new book by Pekka Hämäläinen, a picture emerges of a four-century-long struggle for primacy among Native power centers in North America. When the term indian appears in the Declaration of Independence, it is used to refer to “savage” outsiders employed by the British as a way of keeping the colonists down. For the Finnish scholar Hämäläinen, this emphasis on what Native people meant to white Americans misses an important factor: Native power. The lore about Jamestown and Plymouth, Pocahontas and Squanto, leads many Americans to think in terms of tragedy and, eventually, disappearance. But actually, Indigenous people continued to control most of the interior continent long after they were outnumbered by the descendants of Europeans and Africans….and in other ancestral east coast news…
The bones of ancient native dogs have been found at Jamestown Virginia..…University of Iowa researchers traveled there and helped to make a DNA match…They were dogs that howled but didn’t bark. They resembled foxes or wolves. And they had been the companions of Native Americans for thousands of years, after their ancestors arrived with early migrants from Asia. Now, DNA that appears to be from descendants of these long-vanished canines has turned up at the Jamestown colonial site in Virginia, where starving settlers may have eaten them, experts at Jamestown and the University of Iowa said. It is the first proof that Indigenous dogs were at Jamestown, and is a link to the bones of more than 100 that were found at a Native American site nearby in the 1970s and ’80s.
. .. ….Those are your headlines at this hour……I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI Newscenter…
