Many Feathers and Much Paint Don't Make an Indian

        Indians Invented and Played Football for Enormous Stakes Over Courses a mile long     Although a form of football was played by both the Greeks and Romans under the title of  Feninda, and later Spheromakin, it has been recently demonstrated that the North American Indians invented and played a game similar to the football of early and middle age Europe. In a recent article upon the subject, Parke Davis, the statistician and historian of the modern games, writes as follows:      "The first American played football in a well specialized game of which he also was the inventor. Like Lacrosse, the Indian played his game of football upon the flat sands. The ball was made of leather; sewn with a tong and filled with moss. The goals were a mile and more apart. The players ordinarily were braves of the same tribe, but upon special occasions the game would be waged between selected players of different tribes, one tribe arrayed against ano...

Marie Smith Jones worked to preserve her heritage as the last full-blooded Eyak until her death in 2008. When she passed, her language, a branch of the Athabaskan Indian family of languages, and one of only 20 native languages in Alaska, died also. Words and tales carrying a thousand years of oral history and cultural tradition will be forgotten.  She did not raise her children to speak her language because she grew up in a time when it was taboo to speak anything other than English. But once her last sibling died, she decided to reach out to a linguist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. She wanted a written record of her language, in hopes that a future generation will some day resurrect it.  "Language is part of the essence of our whole being," said (1992) State Rep Georgianna Lincoln, a Koyukon Athabaskan Indian who wanted schools to teach local native languages. "It just seems sinful that here we are teaching our children other languages that they will never u...

Today in History:  Jan 6, 1975 - Mattie Grinnell of Twin Buttes, North Dakota, dies at the age of 108. She was the last full-blooded of the Mandan Nation. A Billings Gazette newspaper article featured a photo of her in their January 7, 1973 newspaper (two years prior to hear death), saying she had passed 105 winters, then living in a cabin on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, without electricity or plumbing. She received a Civil War pension of $125 a month, from her husband was a Union Soldier. Her son, Jack, who lived with her at the age of 77, drew a $105 pension from World War I. She also had three daughters. Very grainy photo.. but it's Mattie outside her cabin. January 7, 1973. The Billings Gazette  Her documented age was 105, and she said "I was born in an Indian village of this reservation. We lived in mound houses then, you know." She remembered that the lodges were furnished with woven mats around the fireplace, and buffalo robes. Her father was Bad Bull, a s...

Jan 3, 1913   The Holbrook News 

The Dakota 38 execution was the largest mass execution in the United States  and took place on December 26, 1862 Vincent Schilling • December 27, 2017 On the day after Christmas in 1862, 38 Dakota men were hanged under order of President Abraham Lincoln. The hangings and convictions of the Dakota 38 resulted from the aftermath of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 in southwest Minnesota.               Click here to continue reading ... 

"First, I wish to impress upon the readers of The Journal that the word 'squaw' is not an Indian word, but one manufactured by the English speaking people who came to our New England shores. We have always resented this word, which carries with it a sense of derision and insult. The intelligent and educated Indian woman of today feels this indignity, even in greater measure than did her grandmothers of yesterday. There are women of my race in twin cities occupying positions in a dozen different professions and occupations. We plead for the relegation to No Man's Land of this objectionable word." - Source: 1918, Dec 12  The Tomahawk