Photo by Freddy Lane of the Lummi - Tribe A woman stands on the beach at Neah Bay, Wash., home of the Makah Nation, as her canoe family recites its protocol, asking permission of the host nation to come ashore from the 19th annual Canoe Journey of the Coast Salish Nations and their relatives on the Pacific Coast.

The annual Canoe Journey began in 1989 and has occurred every year since 1993. Each year a different Indian nation among the Coast Salish has hosted, with canoes from all nations crossing internal and territorial borders to join together on the water highways of their ancestors. Landing at Neah Bay, the point of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, where the Pacific Ocean meets the recently named Salish Sea, canoe families waited their turn to declare their intentions in coming ashore, a protocol as old as the practice of paddling carved cedar canoes on these waters.

Many of the pullers in the canoes are young people from the nations, who train with their elders year-round, forming what’s called a canoe family, and learning songs while building their physical endurance.

Oren Lyons, Faith Keeper, Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, upon witnessing these proceedings three years ago, declared them a display of sovereignty and vibrancy among the Indian nations of the Northwest Coast that all of Indian Country needed to hear about.

At Neah Bay this July 22, Makah language teachers welcomed the canoe families from many nations. Among others on hand were staff members from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, sent to Neah Bay as part of the museum’s Renewing Connections outreach program to Indian Country.

Then Makah Chairman Michael Lawrence translated, “On behalf of the people of the cape, I am honored for your presence….The Makah tribe has long been rich in its culture and has carried on our rich songs and dances, even when the (U.S.) government attempted to tell us to no longer practice our cultural ways.”

The Makah have persisted in participating in the Ozette archaeological site, the remains of a historic village that is considered one of the most important finds in the continental United States; have fished per their treaty and tradition for salmon and halibut among other species of the sustaining sea life of their culture; and mounted a successful whale hunt in 1999, ending a pause of more than 70 years.

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American Indian News Service

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Photo by Nick Vanderpuy, Courtesy of News from Indian Country. Dennis White, who is Ojibwe, teaches the ancient art of finger weaving at a workshop sponsored by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. The event was held on the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation in Wisconsin, where White works as administrator of the tribal school.

Last year White was one of four recipients of a residency from the Artist Leadership program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. White spent two weeks in Washington, D.C., studying the museum’s collection of finger-woven sashes and bags worn in Ojibwe culture.

“Finger weaving was at one time an important and widespread art among our people in the Great Lakes, but now there are not that many people in Wisconsin and Michigan that actually do the weaving at the advanced level,” White said.

He conducted two workshops, one at the museum in Washington, and the other—a three-day gathering—at the Migizi Cultural Center at the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College in late February.

White taught himself the art of finger weaving from books in the early 1980s when he was studying for his master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He subsequently consulted with elders who knew the craft and became one of the few living Ojibwe finger weavers.

“Before the Europeans came we would use fur that fell off any creature, like the hair you comb off a dog or cat, and spin that into a fiber for weaving,” he said. “When the Europeans came with blankets, we unraveled their blankets for the yarn. We already had blankets made from rabbit skin, and their blankets weren’t as warm.”

White, who works as the administrator at the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe School, www.lcoschools.bia.edu, also has been known to use finger weaving as a way to teach mathematics to young people.

“To me there is a fine line and almost no line between mathematics and art,” White said. “The designs I make for my belts and sashes, they start out as a set of symbols.

“If I have a problem weaving that is probably a number problem,” he said. “If you can recognize the patterns you are on your way to understanding mathematics.”

Learn about the National Museum of the American Indian’s Expressive Arts Program at www.americanindian.si.edu/icap/recipients.html.

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

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By Katherine Fogden. New tastes are part of the "Power of Chocolate," a festival, which will be celebrated at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian on Feb. 13-14.

Mayans transplanted the cacao tree from the rainforest to their villages and fermented, dried and roasted its seeds to concoct a decidedly unsweet drink involving chilies and lots of froth.

The Aztec were drinking the bitter brew when the Spanish Conquistadors arrived in the 1520s. Although the Spaniards didn’t like the beverage, they hauled the cacao seeds back to Europe. A century later, when someone thought to add sugar—a luxury the ancient Mayans didn’t have—this indigenous American flavor became a lasting worldwide sensation.

Native ties to making chocolate continue into the 21^st century via Bedré Fine Chocolates, a company the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma bought in 2000. Bedré, sold in Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdale’s department stores, is particularly proud to provide the guitar-shaped chocolates to three of the Seminole Nation’s Hard Rock© hotels. Guests find the delicious products of the only Native American-owned chocolate company in the United States on their pillows.

At the Smithsonian’s Mitsitam Cafe, Hetzler likes to cook chocolate the old-school way, though with a twist. His Mexican hot chocolate is both sweet and spiced with pasilla peppers. And the Mitsitam’s Chocolate and Coconut Soup draws out the chocolate’s distinctive flavor with coconut milk, onions and pasilla negro chile peppers.

Hetzler will demonstrate cooking with chocolate during the museum’s “Power of Chocolate” festival on Feb. 13-14. The festival will travel back to the roots of chocolate with Bolivian cacao farmers and presentations about the history, mythology and art surrounding its origins.

Mitsitam Cafe shares the flavor, originally sipped with chilies by the Mayans, with two quick, tasty recipes.

The Mitsitam Cafe’s Chocolate and Coconut Soup, garnished with cocoa-dusted plantains

Serves 3-4

• 1 medium white onion, diced
• 2 medium shallots, diced
• 3 dried pasilla negro chile peppers
• 2 cups half-and-half
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 14-oz. can of coconut milk
• 8 oz. bittersweet chocolate (74 percent)

For garnish:

• 1 green plantain
• ¼ cup cocoa powder
• ¼ cup sugar

To prepare:

For the soup, sauté onions, shallots and the dried chiles until translucent. Add cream and half-and-half; bring to a boil. Remove from heat and add chocolate. Whisk until blended. Add coconut milk. Puree in blender. Season lightly with salt.

For garnish, peel a green plantain and slice fruit into thin discs. Lightly deep fry until crispy. Stir together cocoa and sugar, and use the mixture to lightly coat the fried plantain chips. Scatter the cocoa-coated chips atop each serving of soup.

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

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By Mathieu Génon, courtesy of Brian Jungen “Carapace,” 2009, is a work made from industrial waste bins by Brian Jungen of the Dunne-za First Nations in British Columbia. “Strange Comfort,” an exhibition of his sculpture, is at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian until Aug. 8.

An emu on roller skates and a two-tone crocodile—both crafted from plastic luggage—hang from a mobile in the Potomac Atrium. In the retrospective’s gallery, a whale skeleton hangs resplendent under lights. Only upon closer inspection does it become clear that the whale’s bones are cut from common plastic chairs.

Jungen, 40, of the Dunne-za First Nations in British Columbia, is called the best Native artist of his generation by Paul Chaat Smith, curator of “Strange Comfort.” Jungen’s work is usually shown by modern art galleries in cities such as New York, Montreal, Rotterdam and Munich. Never have his creations been made available, as they are now, to the zoo-going set.

The museum is visited by about 40,000 schoolchildren a year. On a recent Wednesday, about a dozen third-graders from Emmanuel Christian School in Springfield, Va., found themselves sitting on the gallery floor, surrounded by Jungen’s “Carapace.” The children didn’t know the word carapace means exoskeleton or shell.

So the museum’s lead cultural interpreter, Sharyl Pahe, who is San Carlos Apache and Navajo, asks the students to do a little deductive work.

“If we look at what is all around us,” she asks, “what does it look like?”

Trash bins, the third-graders answer in unison.

“You’ll see that this artist has taken something useful like a trash bin and cut it in two,” Pahe says. “Is it still useful?”

No, the children almost sing.

“But what does this make you think of?”

A hut, a fort, a forest or bleachers, the third-graders offer.

“Could it be a turtle shell?” Pahe asks.

The children look with new eyes at the plastic shell.

“Why is this turtle shell so big?”

The children look quizzically at her. She explains, “To some tribes, the turtle represents the earth. The shell is important because it is like the land.”

The children nod in understanding. They’ve visited this landscape of the imagination before, though perhaps not through the works of a Dunne-za artist who could be the age of their parents, but who, like them, lives in a society where white plastic chairs and green garbage cans can be the backdrop of imagination.

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of Irving Nelson - Children attend the summer reading program at the Navajo Nation Library.

He’s more likely to be discovered among the bookshelves, where he recently finished a three-decades-long project: He personally catalogued his library’s 73,392 books.

“I won’t get to see all the people the library touches,” said Nelson, who is Navajo. “But we’re touching the lives of people out there.”

Nelson, 50, was one of two individuals recently honored with the Prism Award by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Given for the first time this year, the Prism Award recognizes unsung Native American heroes who serve their communities in innovative ways.

Hired in 1977 to drive the bookmobile, Nelson has built a formerly humble library of several hundred books into an eight-employee system encompassing a main library in Window Rock, Ariz., a branch library in nearby Kayenta and several mini-libraries across the Navajo reservation. Each day about 350 people visit the libraries, and not just for the books. Many come to use the free Internet. Some do homework or look for jobs, others email friends and family in the military. Some search archival records, which include Navajo land-claim documents dating back to 1675.

Many tribes established libraries in the mid-1970s after the National Indian Education Association released a series of pamphlets about how to start them.

“Now tribal libraries truly run the gamut,” said Liana Juliano, president of the American Indian Library Association. “One library is in a house with bookshelves in the bathroom. Others are sophisticated libraries that function like a public library anywhere with storytelling times and computer access.”

But the majority share a tradition of making the most of scarce resources, said Mary Villegas of the library development division of the Arizona State Library. “A lot of tribal libraries, I call them a library of one, providing all the services of a public library,” she said. “Tribal librarians are an amazing group of individuals; they have amazing camaraderie among them.”

The original library at Window Rock, capital of the Navajo Nation, was opened in 1941 by wives of Bureau of Indian Affairs employees. Located in the basement of the old BIA building, the library had asbestos-covered steam pipes running along its ceiling, and a heating system that didn’t always work when Nelson joined the staff in 1977.

Driving the bookmobile took Nelson to far-flung corners of his reservation, roughly equal in size to the state of West Virginia. He navigated rugged terrain and rutted roads to bring books to all of Navajo’s 110 chapters, each the size of a county.

The bookmobile went memorably kaput after two years. “The last time I drove the bookmobile, it broke down 90 miles out of Window Rock in January,” he said. “We walked back, two of us with one jacket between us. We just passed it back and forth.”

That was only the prelude to Nelson’s journey to bring books to the Navajo people. It would take him to cities on both the East and West Coast, where he picks up donated new books by the truckload and drives them back to the Navajo Nation—and not just to the library. The Navajo Book Project, which he ran until 2002, put more than one million new books into the hands of the reservation’s readers.

Herbert Long Sr., who once supervised the library, said Nelson has also worked to provide computers to chapter offices so people in remote areas can have Internet access.

“When I was growing up, there was really nothing here for kids,” Long said. “Up to at least the last year or so, even if you had a computer, you were pretty much limited to dial-up Internet service. Now he is increasing the access for people.”

Nelson’s resourcefulness has sustained the library for more than two decades. In his early days, he learned how to dry out books after a flood, spending months saving the collection. In recent years, he has worked with a company to digitize the leading newspaper on the reservation, the Navajo Times.

Nelson’s current challenge is how to share and perpetuate his life’s work through his staff and community, Long said. The lifelong reader, the man who has brought  a million books to his nation, is losing his sight to glaucoma.

But like the country veterinarian in James Herriot’s “All Things Great and Small,” his favorite series of novels (which he rereads every year), Nelson is simply heading into a new chapter.

And it’s not the books on the shelves or the catalogue of accomplishments that motivate him. It’s serving people who like to read.

“I don’t think that I am a leader,” Nelson said. “Anyone can do it. They just have to have fortitude and a lot of passion for their work.”

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian A Walla Walla bag, made about 1915 of seed beads, wool, canvas, hide and cotton thread, is on display in "A Song for the Horse Nation" at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

The exhibition celebrates the relationship between American Indians and horses, featuring 98 elaborate examples that include horse trappings, objects with horse motifs and new works specially commissioned for the show. Originally indigenous to the Americas, the horse had become extinct before being reintroduced to the Western Hemisphere by way of European ships in the 15^th century. The exhibition revolves around the return of what some Native peoples call the Horse Nation, a great ally to the Native nations.

“Even though the pinnacle of the horse lasted only a century, this exhibition details how Native people rapidly integrated the horse into their lifeways, quickly becoming among the best mounted soldiers in the world,” said National Museum of the American Indian Director Kevin Gover, who is Pawnee.

The online exhibition, www.AmericanIndian.si.edu/exhibitions/horsenation, shares the script with the actual one, offering photos of many objects on display at the museum. Web viewers who live far away from the museums in Washington, D.C., and New York get a chance to share the experience in real time thanks to the online version’s simultaneous launch.

“It’s a comprehensive representation of the gallery exhibition that will grow in time to include additional educational resources and incorporate more interactive elements that might not be possible in the physical exhibition,” said Jason Wigfield, a web developer for the museum. “It’s a good opportunity for people, who, geographically speaking, may not be able to make it to the museum. And in addition to that, it’s accessible anytime and for long after the exhibition closes.

“This online exhibition is a great resource for teachers, parents, and anyone interested in exploring this topic.”

Interactive features, such as the opportunity to hear the word for “horse” in several Native languages through the computer, are a natural on the Web. Both the online exhibition and the one in New York provide recordings for the following languages: in Assiniboine, thongatch-shonga or sho-a-thin-ga (“big dog”); in A’aninin (Gros Ventre), it-shuma-shunga (“red dog”); in Lakota, Sunkakhan (“holy dog” or “mystery dog”); in Siksika of the Blackfoot, ponoka-mita (“elk dog”); in Cree, mistatim (“big dog”).

The exhibition uses video, images and commissioned artwork to carry the story of American Indians’ relationship with the horse into contemporary times.

“A Song for the Horse Nation” will be on view at the museum in New York until July 7, 2011. It is scheduled to reopen at the museum in Washington, D.C., in October 2011 and run through January 2013, followed by a national tour.

If you can’t wait for a chance to see it in person, visit www.AmericanIndian.si.edu/exhibitions/horsenation to view it from home or classroom.

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of Wampum Books “Poneasequa: Goddess of the Waters," by Stephanie A. Duckworth-Elliott, is the inaugural title from the new Native American publisher Wampum Books.

The dream belongs to author Stephanie Duckworth-Elliott, who is Wampanoag tribe of Gay Head, Mass. In the process of getting her own book published, she developed a plan for a publishing house that would publish great, but little-known Native American authors and others.

Wampum Books debuted this November as its edition of “Poneasequa” went to market nationally. In this venture Duckworth-Elliott is in the unique position of being a Wampanoag woman who owns a national book publishing house.

“The whole point of the book is motivating yourself, loving where you come from, and loving where you are,” Duckworth-Elliott said. “The point of Wampum Books is to bring to the reading public authentic Native voices.”

As she has toured the country, appearing recently at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian’s Native Writers Series, Duckworth-Elliott has found herself speaking to young adult readers about the importance of knowing their own roots.

“The character is really based on me. Once I accepted who I was and loved who I was, everything got easier,” Duckworth-Elliott said.  “I think that’s a huge message for children.”

“Poneasequa” grew out of a promise that she made to her grandfather. He helped to raise her, and died when she was 19. She promised him she would write about their relationship. Heroine McKenzie Jones likewise is raised by a Wampanoag grandfather. But when McKenzie gets tapped by her fifth-grade teacher to tell the class about what it means to be a Wampanoag, she must first find out for herself.

That’s when the adventure begins. McKenzie tries to document a day trip with her grandfather, but instead finds herself slipping through time on a journey that will bring her face to face with her ancestors. She emerges from the encounter a Wampanoag girl who is confident of who she is.

The novel, said Lisa Brooks, Abenaki, a Harvard University assistant professor of history and literature, “is the first book from southern New England to directly address young readers and to relate the story of a contemporary Wampanoag girl living in the 21^st century. Such an approach is vitally important in educating non-Native readers.”

Duckworth-Elliott is a former sixth-grade teacher and former director of development for the Princeton Center for Leadership. She also has taught several college classes, including as a faculty member of Rutgers University and Princeton University.

She launches Wampum Books in the hope of signing contracts with 10 authors in the next year. She aims to expand the market for Native American books, whether fiction, non-fiction or memoir. She will publish books on any subject, as long as the author’s voice is authentic, in her view. She hopes that the sale of books and related opportunities for her authors will become a revenue stream into Indian Country.

Duckworth-Elliott takes advantage of the new print-on-demand technology to create only as many books as are ordered. She plans full-scale marketing of her new authors and national distribution of their books.

“Native writers have not been given the opportunity to have their stories told, and also to have ownership over their stories,” Duckworth-Elliott said. “My goal is to inspire people and allow them to tell their stories.”

Already “Poneasequa” is available at Barnes & Noble stores in New England, and she plans to sell the novel nationwide through popular book retailers. She also sells at book signings, which she plans to do across North America.

She sees a niche in publishing books for all ages. These books, as she envisions them, will share the complex experiences of living in Indian Country, even the experience of growing up as she did.

“Part of my message is, ‘You can do it,’” she said. “I was told I could not. I was left by my parents at age 10. I was an emancipated minor at 17. I graduated with my first graduate degree at 23, suffered many illnesses, including cancer, but yet I still rise. Our collective struggle within Indian Country is one that is shared by so many, but not told or understood.”

Learn more at www.duckworthelliott.com.

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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By Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American Indian. Murray Porter, Mohawk, leads the Rez Bluez All-Starz in concert at the museum. In his signature tune “Colours,” Porter sings, “He’s a red man, singing the black man’s blues, living in a white man’s world.”

But Elaine Bomberry, host of “Rez Bluez,” a show on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in Canada, explained to an audience at the National Museum of the American Indian that the roots of this American form of music also extend deep into Native American musical traditions.

“The whole heartbeat of the blues is very much like our drum,” Bomberry said, during a discussion called “The Blues: Roots, Branches and Beyond.”

Ron Welburn, a Native poet and scholar of jazz, said that he can hear the influences of music from many Native nations on early blues recordings.

“There are things that say to me that someone knows something about stomp dancing, a part of Southeastern Native American music from before European contact,” he said. “It’s the call-and-response phrasing, and the length of the statement, which may be longer than the response.”

By Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American Indian Corey Harris, performing at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, is a student of anthropology and linguistics, and MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient. Harris, who is Cherokee, Creek and Chickasaw, said, “Africans being taken in by Native American communities was always spoken of in our families….You couldn’t see it in a book, but it was passed down through families.”

The Aug. 22 conversation was followed by a concert in the museum’s Indian Summer Showcase series. Performances featured blues artists George Leach of the Sta’atl’imx Nation in British Columbia; the Rez Bluez All-Starz with Murray Porter, Mohawk, and Beaver Thomas, who is Cowesseness First Nation; plus special guests Corey Harris, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” and string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

The blues were birthed in a unique moment of history when the slave trade and colonization of the American South forced people and their musical traditions to come together, explained Welburn, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

By Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American IndianGeorge Leach, Sta’atl’imx, won Best Male Artist of the Year and Best Rock Album at the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards in 2000 for his debut album, “Just Where I’m At.” Denis Rondeau plays bass behind Leach at a National Museum of the American Indian’s Summer Showcase concert.

Plantations brought together Irish indentured servants, African slaves and also Native slaves. “All lived together, all procreated together,” said Justin Robinson of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Later escaped slaves found refuge in Native communities from the South and, in time, up the Underground Railroad to the Six Nations in Canada.

“The Underground Railroad was Tuscarora Indian trails to the Niagara River and across. Tuscaroras would bring the escaped slaves across to Six Nations, where I’m from,” Bomberry said. Watch a clip from Bomberry’stelevision show at www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kpi_vQOb4w.

When the blues began to be recorded in the early 20th century, many artists self-identified as Native American. Welburn said Charley Patton, who is called the father of Mississippi Delta blues, was Choctaw. Scrapper Blackwell was Eastern Band Cherokee. Listen to Blackwell atwww.youtube.com/watch?v=yjZO44o0E8A.

By Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American Indian The Carolina Chocolate Drops—Dom Flemons on four-string banjo, guitar, jug, harmonica, kazoo, snare drum, and bones; and Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson on fiddle and five-string banjo—strive to carry on the traditional music of the communities of the Carolina Piedmont.

But ancestry isn’t as important to musicologists as what can be documented in the music, said Welburn, who is Gingaskin/Assateague, Cherokee and African American.

“They want to know what a person picked up from another musical source, like four beats to the measure,” he said. “Powwow drumming is four beats to a measure.”

Welburn counts: boom, boom, boom, boom. He hears this beat in the earliest blues recordings, though later it would be expanded upon.

“‘Chika, ching, chika, ching, chika, ching’ was started by a drummer—a Mohawk and African American guy, Jesse Price,” he said. Price lived in Kansas City and toured with the likes of Count Basie on a circuit that included Oklahoma. His peers said they believe his drumming style came from Native music.

“Because of that location you can associate certain dances,” Welburn said. “In round dancing, there is a ‘chika, ching’ syncopation. Even guys who have bells or deer toes on garters make a similar sound walking around.”

The blues’ call-and-response song structure, which has been attributed to African-American folk music, may also have older roots in Native American music. “It’s not a matter of someone trying to take credit,” Welburn said. “It’s about finding the roots.”

Blues and jazz artists have made similar observations.

Oscar Pettiford, the late Cherokee, Choctaw and African-American bandleader, gave an interview in 1960 to the magazine Jazz Times, in which he stated that jazz attempts to render an American Indian beat.

By Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American Indian Blues singer and bass player Shakti Hayes, Plains Cree, of the Rez Bluez All-Starz performs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian with guitarist Beaver Thomas, Plains Cree from the Cowessess First Nation. Thomas has opened for country star Dwight Yoakam.

In the 1970s, Welburn remembers Lewis McMillan, a drummer with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra who was mixed-race Cherokee, telling him, “Ronny, don’t ever let anyone tell you that our people didn’t have anything to do with jazz.”

Recently, singer and percussionist Cyril Neville, the youngest of the famed New Orleans’ group the Neville Brothers, told Bomberry, “Sister, we both own the blues.”

Murray Porter, who first heard B.B. King as a teenager at the Six Nations in Ontario while listening late into the night to radio from Chicago, said the genre has always been about cross-pollination.

“It’s not an African thing; it’s not a Native thing,’’ he said. Later, in concert before more than 1,000 people at the museum, he improvised a sort of musical invocation, singing, “Everybody get together. Everybody get together. Everybody get together and let the good times roll.”

The Wellbriety Journey for Forgiveness, a 6,800-mile trip across the United States, concluded in ceremony in the Potomac Atrium of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian on Wednesday, June 24. The journey, made by car, began in May at the Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Ore., and visited 23 current and former boarding schools in 18 states.

By Abby BensonSmithsonian’s National Museum of the American IndianThe Wellbriety Journey for Forgiveness arrives in the Potomac Atrium of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian on June 24, to complete a 6,800-mile cross-country pilgrimage. Participants stopped at 23 current and former boarding schools, seeking healing for the schools’ survivors and their families

Don Coyhis, founding director and organizer of White Bison Inc., has sent a letter to President Obama asking for an apology for the abuses to Native American children in boarding schools. He hopes that the United States will follow in the steps of Canada and Australia, which have both apologized for lasting harm caused by boarding schools.

Coyhis said, quoting elders, that now is the time of forgiveness. Native peoples must forgive the unforgivable in order for healing to begin from the addiction, suicide and abuse that grew out of the 131-year-old boarding school system, he said.

Starting at Carlisle Boarding School in Pennsylvania in 1878, the U.S. government developed a pattern of separating Native students from their families, cultures and languages using punishment, and physical and sexual abuse, Coyhis said in a YouTube broadcast about the journey.

During the journey, local organizers invited the Native public to take part in events in their area, which drew hundreds of people. Lonny Pennycord, a member of the Boarding School Healing Project, participated in both the journey’s start in Oregon and its conclusion at the museum in Washington, D.C.

“I am proud to have been a part of this historic journey, being there at the beginning at Chemawa Indian School on May 16th, and at the end on June 24th at the National Museum of the American Indian,” Pennycord wrote. “The time for this healing has been a long time coming for the generations forcibly required to attend the boarding schools in the government’s attempts at assimilation of these proud peoples.”

At the journey’s conclusion, a ceremony was held, and those gathered were invited to step into the sacred hoop, to forgive and to be healed.

Learn about the Wellbriety Journey for Forgiveness, and read journal entries from the route, at www.whitebison.org/wellbriety-journey/index.htm.