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A stretch of highway running through the center of the Blackfeet Nation has been renamed to honor the late Blackfeet Chief Earl Old Person.
Montana Public Radio’s Ellis Juhlin reports from Browning at the highway’s dedication ceremony.
A group of more than 200 people gathered alongside the section of U.S. Highway 89 that now bears Chief Old Person’s name.
(Courtesy State Sen. Susan Webber)
As the new road sign was unveiled, drummers played one of the chief’s favorite songs, used to celebrate a victory.
Several dozen friends and family of Old Person got up to share their favorite memories of the beloved Blackfeet leader, along with members of Congress.
State Sen. Susan Webber (Blackfeet/D-MT 8th) carried the bill to rename this stretch of road.
“And it feels really good, it’s done, we did our best towards our chief, his name will always be here, it’ll always be on the map.”
Old Person led the tribe for 40 years, before he died in 2021.
The renaming ceremony is part of the first day of the Blackfeet Nation’s North American Indian Days, an annual celebration which will run through the weekend.
The rate of Indigenous women that died during or shortly after pregnancy more than doubled in recent decades.
Montana Public Radio’s Aaron Bolton reports that’s according to a new study.
The study published in the Journal of the American Medicine Association showed that maternal mortality rates for Native American and Alaska Native women increased by nearly 110% between 1999 and 2019. That was the largest increase among all racial groups.
Deaths among Indigenous women were especially high across the Great Plains.
Northern mountain states like Montana were also found to have high maternal death rates among all races.
Researchers say it’s hard to determine what drove the spike in deaths among Native American pregnant women because death records across the country can vary widely.
Causes of maternal mortality include suicide, substance abuse, excessive bleeding, and infection among many other conditions.
Researchers say racial disparities among pregnant women can in part be attributed to systemic and interpersonal racism.
Photo: Asociación Comunicarte / Facebook
Guatemala celebrated the holiday known as the Day of the Army this week, while many Indigenous groups marched to commemorate what they called the March of Memory to remember the thousands of largely Indigenous lives lost at the hands of the military forces during that Central American country’s decades long civil conflict.
Maria Martin reports.
Members of the organization Hijos, made up of the children of war victims and their supporters, took to the streets of Guatemala City and carried pictures of their murdered and disappeared loved ones – to honor the thousands of lives lost during the long civil war that began in the wake of a CIA-sponsored military coup in 1954.
The so-called March for Memory has taken place annually since 1999, three years after the signing of peace accords ending the 36 year-old civil conflict in which the government attempted to crush guerilla uprisings to change this deeply unequal society.
The annual commemoration also takes place in opposition to the celebration of the annual holiday known as Army Day – some in the march call that celebration an insult to the victims of the conflict.
It was the military, according to the United Nations, that was responsible for more than 90% of the 200,000 killed and disappeared during one of the longest civil wars in the Americas, in which hundreds of massacres took place and some 400 Indigenous villages were destroyed.
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