Crime Fiction Goes Native

Marcie Rendon was in her mid-60s when her first novel, Murder on the Red River, was published in 2017. She had written for the theater, plus a couple of children’s books, and her bio line also describes her as a “community arts activist,” but nothing she’d done up to that point would have suggested she was about to embark on what Louise Erdrich—the doyenne of Native American novelists—has described as an “addictive and authentically Native crime series propelled by the irresistible Cash Blackbear, a warm, sad, funny, and intuitive Ojibwe woman.”

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'Long live' the Chiefs! President Trump backs Long Island school being forced to change its native American logo and mascot



President Trump publicly directed his secretary of education to intervene with a New York high school that is being forced to change its mascot.

The Massapequa Chiefs of Massapequa High School from Long Island, New York, have been forced to change their mascot name and logo after a judge ruled in March against the school over a statewide mandate from 2023.

According to the New York Post, the New York State Board of Regents declared in 2023 that schools must remove Native American team names and imagery from all New York public schools.

'What could be wrong with using the name, "Chief"?'

Standing up for the district, Trump took to Truth Social and said the people of Massapequa have been "fighting furiously to keep the Massapequa Chiefs logo on their Teams and School."

"Forcing them to change the name, after all of these years, is ridiculous and, in actuality, an affront to our great Indian population. The
School Board, and virtually everyone in the area, are demanding the name be kept," the president continued.

President Trump not only cited NFL team the Kansas City Chiefs as an example as to why the name should remain, but then directed his secretary of education to look into the matter.

"What could be wrong with using the name, 'Chief'? I don't see the Kansas City Chiefs changing their name anytime soon! By copy of this TRUTH, I am asking my highly capable Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, to fight for the people of Massapequa on this very important issue. LONG LIVE THE MASSAPEQUA CHIEFS!"

Nearly five dozen school districts are being forced to change their names amid funding threats from the New York State Board of Regents, including another high school whose mascot is the Wantagh Warriors in Wantagh, New York. Both teams allegedly had no plans to replace their mascot names or imagery in compliance with the mandate, but have until June to implement such changes.

"Changing the name doesn't have any good effect on our kids. This is their identity, this is who they are — they are Chiefs," Massapequa School Board President Kerry Wachter claimed. Wachter told the Post that sending a signal to Trump's Department of Education is the hail Mary as the end of the school year approaches.

"Perhaps the secretary of education or President Trump might feel that they might have some authority here to step in," Wachter added.

However, in a statement to The Hill, a spokesperson for the New York State Education Department said the school mascots were disrespectful.

"Disrespecting entire groups of people is wrong in any context, but especially in our schools, where all students should feel welcome and supported," NYSED communications director JP O'Hare said. "[The Regents] were compelled to act because certain Native American names and images have been shown to perpetuate negative stereotypes that are demonstrably harmful to children."

The spokesperson added that the regulations specifically permit the continued use of Native American names and mascots if they are approved by "local tribal leaders."

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'Indigenous Knowledge' Pseudoscience Thrives in Newsom's Government

"Indigenous knowledge," a pseudoscience that posits Native Americans possess an innate understanding of how the world works, is thriving in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom's (D.) administration has contended that "Western science" must embrace "the generations of knowledge held by Indigenous communities," according to a Washington Free Beacon review of state documents.

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Biden Orders Scientific Agency To Expand Use of 'Indigenous Knowledge' in Final Days

The White House ordered the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal regulatory agency, to expand its use of "indigenous knowledge" on Monday, as part of a last-minute push in the federal government to embrace what scientists call pseudoscience.

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Brown University Donates Land To Native American Tribe

'Traditional cultural property'

For Tim Walz's Minnesota Homelessness Council, Work Starts With Acknowledgment of 'Stolen Land'

The Minnesota Interagency Council on Homelessness, part of Gov. Tim Walz's cabinet, heads the state's efforts to "end homelessness." At its monthly webinars, however, the council's members start by addressing a different topic: land acknowledgment.

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‘Bidenbucks’ Plan Uses Native American School Children In Voter Registration Scheme

Records also expose Biden’s secretary of the Interior arguably stepping over the Hatch Act line barring political activities on the job.

'The Cartels Know This': Biden's Border Crisis Pushes Montana's Indian Country to the Brink

BOZEMAN, Mont.—The Fort Belknap Indian Reservation sits just 40 miles from the Canadian border, but threats to its sovereignty—and to tribal members’ lives—are coming all the way from Mexico. A rising cartel presence—bringing increased drugs and violence to a community that already had plenty of both—has left some tribal members believing that the White House has all but left them behind.

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Pentagon Shells Out Half a Million Dollars for ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ Research

The Pentagon awarded nearly $500,000 to a small firm in rural Alaska to research "indigenous knowledge," according to federal records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

What that money will fund exactly is unclear. According to the contract’s description, Northern Social-Environmental Research Inc. will use $499,995 for a "northern social-environmental research proposal" about "advancing methods to engage and apply indigenous knowledge for increased understanding of arctic coastal systems through community-based research."

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Raid and Remembrance

There are two mistakes we can make about life in North America in the first century of English colonization. The first is the common one which many, if not most, of us grew up with, that the English settlers of the Atlantic seaboard at first lived happy and fraternal lives with the tribes of that coastline until something led to the outbreak of conflict, after which the tribes lost, lost, and lost, and then conveniently melted away. The second mistake is to rush to the other end of the spectrum and paint an idyllic portrait of precolonial life that is only disrupted by the intrusion of arrogant and aggressive Europeans, with the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay taking the prize as the most arrogant and aggressive. As in most movements of interpretation and then reinterpretation, the truth usually lies somewhere between the spectrum’s ends, and even then is generally more of a zig-zag than a fixed point. The long history of the human species itself is a story of incessant movement, displacement, assimilation, absorption, intermingling and—not the least—genocidal conquest, in which the number of saints is perilously small and the percentage of sinners depressingly great. Taken together, it gives historians little reason to be optimists, much less partisans.

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