Dr. Lawrence Tabak, who is performing the duties of The National Institutes of Health Director, announced the selection of Dr. Karina Walters as the new director of the NIH Tribal Health Research Office (THRO). She will succeed Dr. David Wilson, who has taken an assignment at the White House Council on Native American Affairs. Dr. Walters is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma with more than 28 years of experience in American Indian/Alaska Native health research. As THRO Director she will advance initiatives to ensure Tribally informed biomedical and behavioral research, enhance NIH’s Tribal Consultation and Tribal engagement efforts, and coordinate American Indian/Alaska Native research across NIH and with other federal entities. Dr. Walters begins her new role in April.
As Plundered Items Return to Wounded Knee, Decisions Await. The Oglala Sioux Tribe recently secured the return of cultural objects kept for over a century in a tiny Massachusetts museum. Now it is seeking consensus on their final resting place. At a hilltop cemetery in Wounded Knee, S.D., the site of one of the bloodiest massacres by American soldiers against Native Americans, a small crowd gathered around a cluster of boxes that had been laid reverently atop two feet of snow. Inside were Lakota cultural objects and belongings that had been returned after more than a century on the other side of the country: moccasins, sacred pipes, ritual clothing, beaded leather bags. Some are believed to have been taken from Wounded Knee immediately after the 1890 massacre, when U.S. troops killed as many as 300 or more Lakota men, women and children.
Those are your headlines at this hour. I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI News center.