The World’s Largest Collection of Standing Totem Poles Keeps Getting Bigger…Eighty sculptures in and around Ketchikan, Alaska, tell the ancestral stories of Indigenous clans…According to Tlingit mythology, the first Salmon ever created came from one of the many tribal creation stories. Today, this legend is memorialized in the most prominent totem pole in Ketchikan, Alaska: the 55-foot-tall Chief Johnson pole. The current iteration of the pole, which is a replica built by Tongass Tlingit carver Israel Shotridge in 1989, sits outside the former home of Chief George Johnson, beside Ketchikan Creek, the ancestral fishing grounds of the Tongass Tlingit.
Pat Bellanger spent a half century fighting for Indigenous rights.
Though Bellanger often escaped the public eye, her work survives through her children and community, the attendees of survival schools, and the children protected by the Indian Child Welfare Act. When it became apparent that fighting familial displacement wouldn’t solve the root of the problem, Bellanger and fellow AIM members formed Heart of the Earth Survival School (initially called AIM Survival School) in Minneapolis in January of 1972. Heart of the Earth employed parents and members of surrounding Indigenous communities and successfully worked to revitalize culture, even with little funding in its early years. Heart of the Earth remained open until 2008.
A 30-year-old Pine Ridge man, Isaac Roubideaux, has been sentenced to 442 months in federal prison on eight charges including possession of a firearm and assault resulting in serious bodily injury. According to a Justice Department release, Roubideaux shot a man in the back as he attempted to leave Roubideaux’s residence in Pine Ridge on Nov. 18, 2021. The victim was paralyzed from the waist down as a result of the assault. Roubideaux was also convicted of sexual abuse of a minor in 2016 and was required to register as a sex offender and later failed to register. Roubideaux was indicted by a federal grand jury in December of 2021. He was found guilty of the charges following a jury trial in Rapid City on May 20, 2022.
