By Riley Ehlert and Amelie Lock* 
  
For many Americans, Native sacred places are treated as distant relics of the past — isolated cliff dwellings, famous landmarks, or sites featured in tourism campaigns and history textbooks. This narrow understanding obscures a much deeper truth: Native sacred places exist throughout the United States, including within cities, suburbs, farmland, forests, waterways, and neighborhoods that millions of people move through every day without recognizing what lives under their feet. 

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​By: CC Hovie and Kay Kkendasot Mattena

In 1947, Florence Ivy Begay, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, became the first student to receive a scholarship from the Association on American Indian Affairs (the Association). Florence had just graduated high school with straight A’s—one of only three students in her school’s history to do so. She dreamed of becoming a doctor so that she could return home and serve her Nation.

This article, “A 20-Year Anniversary Reflection on Maria Pearson’s Repatriation and Peace Legacies” was originally published in issue in the Fall & Winter 2023, Issue 193 of Indian Affairs.  
 
By Lawrence W. Gross, Anishinaabe and a citizen of the White Earth Nation. He holds the rank of Professor and serves as the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians Endowed Chair of Native American Studies at the University of Redlands in Redlands, California. He has written extensively on the Anishinaabe people and culture, including Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being. 

I want to start this article by sharing that this is a deeply personal and significant article for me. I share the story of Maria Pearson with as many of my students as possible each year. Her non-English name is Hai-Mecha Eunka, which means Running Moccasins, and she comes from the Yankton Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. I tell my students Maria’s story in hopes that it will teach them the deep significance of repatriation work. As a result, I was very happy to receive the invitation to submit this article from one of my former students. That meant to me that I helped her legacy live on and inspire my students in their work. As I explain below, I also consider Maria to be one of my three mothers, so sharing these stories is deeply valuable for me as well. ​

By Kailash Muthukumar*

My experience reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants felt less like reading a book and more like receiving an education in reciprocity. As a high school senior and a non-Indigenous ally deeply involved in policy and advocacy with organizations like the Association on American Indian Affairs (the Association) and the Institute for American Indian Studies (IAIS), this book did not just introduce me to Indigenous knowledge systems, it provided the essential ethical framework needed to approach federal Indian law, Native Nation sovereignty, and intergenerational  justice with the required humility. 

By: CC Hovie 
 
Every October, Halloween decorations line the shelves, costumes fill the racks, and horror movies flood our screens. But for Native Peoples, this season is another reminder of how our cultures—and even our Ancestors—are too often turned into backdrops for entertainment.  
 
From “Indian costumes” that reduce diverse Native Peoples to stereotypes, to haunted house attractions that use burial sites as props, this pattern is not harmless fun. It is dehumanization. It is appropriation. And it continues to cause real harm. ​