North Dakota’s Republican Gov. Doug Burgum has signed a bill into law to protect tribal cultures by codifying the federal Indian Child Welfare Act into state law, Burgum’s office announced Monday. The federal Indian Child Welfare Act, enacted in 1978, gives preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings of Native children. Also known by the acronym ICWA, it was created in response to the alarming rate at which Native American and Alaska Native children were taken from their homes by public and private agencies.
An Ammonite fossil found in the Hopewell Mound group in Ohio came from South Dakota, a new paper says. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Ohio’s indigenous American Indian Hopewell culture, which dates from around AD 1 to 400, is the use of unusual raw materials that found their way into Ohio from across a huge swath of North America. These included large conch shells from the Gulf of Mexico, copper from around Lake Superior, and even obsidian, a black volcanic glass, from Yellowstone Park in Wyoming. These materials weren’t just admired as curiosities. The ancient American Indian people would have believed they were endowed with great spiritual power…In a paper published in the current issue of the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, avocational archaeologist George Colvin and American Museum of Natural History paleontologist Neil Landman consider “one of the lesser known but more unusual and exotic items recovered from the Hopewell Site.”
Those are your headlines at this hour, I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI news center.
