Don Wetzel Sr., a championship-winning athlete, coach and co-founder of the Montana Indian Athletic Hall of Fame, has died. He was 74. Wetzel died Tuesday in Helena due to an infection, his son Don Wetzel Jr. said. Wetzel led Cut Bank High School to a state basketball championship in 1966, played for the University of Montana and coached Browning basketball and cross-country teams to state titles. In his later years, Wetzel was unable to get Washington’s NFL team to give the Blackfeet Tribe the rights to the team’s former Blackfeet chief logo. The team quit using the logo in 2016.
More than 50 representatives from the National Coalition of Native American Language Schools and Programs convened at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo’s Hawaiian language college, and the university’s ʻImiloa Astronomy Center—the world’s only Indigenous bilingual science center—in February. The summit drew educators from 14 U.S. states and Guam (representing 25 languages) and federal officials from the Office of Indian Education to discuss the achievements and challenges of Native American language medium programs as defined in the Native American Languages Act of 1990.
Those are your headlines at this hour. I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI News center.
