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Anchor: Daniel Montaño
The vice chair of the board that oversees the University of Minnesota system apologized after asking whether one of the higher education institutions has become “too diverse”.
MPR News reports Steve Sviggum posed the question at a Board of Regents meeting. He was referring to the UM-Morris campus that once housed an Indian Boarding School.
Qualified Native students can attend the college tuition-free. Native students are by far the largest minority group enrolled.
Minnesota Public Radio reports during the meeting Sviggum said he’d gotten letters from friends whose children chose different schools because – in his words – they “didn’t feel comfortable there”.
White students make up about 54% percent of the college population. That number is down slightly from five years ago.
Almost a third of the total enrolled students identify as Native.
Astronaut Nicole Mann (Wailaki from the Round Valley Indian Tribes) says she hopes to be an inspiration as the first Native woman to fly into space.
Commander Mann fielded questions from Native media outlets, including Native America Calling, and Native children while aboard the International Space Station on Wednesday.
Mann launched on October 5, serving as mission commander on Nasa’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission, aboard the dragon style aircraft named Endurance.
Associated Press Aerospace writer Marcia Dunn asked Mann questions submitted from various Native media outlets and tribal schools.
The questions covered everything from her view of earth to how tribal wisdom, traditions, and family advice played a role in her career.
She said her accomplishment as the first native woman in space is part of a larger legacy of Native people helping advance the aerospace industry.
“It makes me feel very proud. It makes me proud to be able to follow in the footsteps of those trailblazers – of those other Native Americans and other Native American women that have been involved in aerospace industry and in engineering. There is a long line of people that broke down barriers throughout the years to create these opportunities. I feel grateful to be able to participate and represent onboard the International Space Station. And I really hope to continue that inspiration to other young children around the world.”
NASA says the crew’s mission will last five months and includes hundreds of scientific experiments.
Native leaders in Texas are fighting renewed calls to build two liquified natural gas export terminals on sacred tribal land.
The Texas Tribune reports Juan Mancias, chair of the Carrizo Comecrudo tribe, has been fighting LNG on a global scale for the last year, and has had many victories in that battle.
But the war in Ukraine is driving demand for LNG, and reinvigorated the search for funding to build a gas pipeline and two new terminals on a site in the Rio Grande river delta on the gulf coast.
The area is integral to the Carrizo Comecrudo’s creation beliefs, where they say the first woman was born.
The terminals would be massive structures that liquify natural gas for export to global markets.
The Sierra Club says they would produce as much carbon as more than 40 million cars a year.
Local politicians expressed support for the terminals, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), because of the potential economic benefit they could bring to the area.
The University of Kansas issued an apology and restarted repatriation efforts after Native American ancestors were found as part of the university’s museum collection.
The university said a recent “re-disclosure” identified sacred objects, funerary items, and more, along with the culturally unidentified individual remains.
The school said they had already tried to repatriate the items, but never completed the process.
KU says it will establish a Native advisory committee and consult directly with tribal nations, and provide new facilities for the indigenous studies program and support for students, staff and faculty.
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