Native Peoples

Sisters Daniele (left) and Danica Bell take part in the potato dance, where pairs of dancers with hands held behind their backs hold a potato between their foreheads and try to dance to the beat of a drum without letting the potato fall. The dance, part of the Native Moccasins Rock gathering in Bon Aqua, Tenn., was sponsored by Native American Ministries of the Tennessee-Western Kentucky Conference of The United Methodist Church. Photo by Mike DuBose, UM News.

Celebrating 25 years of Native dance, art and friendship

Annual Native Moccasins Rock event attracts Native American and non-Native participants seeking to better understand and recover Indigenous skills and stories.

Social Concerns

Barbara Braided Hair, left, teaches members of First United Methodist Church in Sheridan, Wyo., how to make fry bread. Barbara is the late wife of Otto Braided Hair Jr., a Sand Creek Massacre descendants representative of the Northern Cheyenne tribe in Lame Deer, Mont., who helped educate church members about the 1864 massacre led by Methodists. The dialogue sparked a two-decade relationship between the church’s Native American Committee and the Northern Cheyenne tribe. File photo courtesy of First UMC Sheridan.

Church forges ties with Sand Creek Massacre descendants

Being a consistent presence has helped the Native American Committee of First United Methodist Church in Sheridan, Wyoming, gain acceptance.

Social Concerns

“The Sand Creek Massacre: The Betrayal That Changed Cheyenne and Arapaho People Forever” will be on display Nov. 10-Dec. 1 at the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill in Washington. The exhibit, normally a permanent installation at the History Colorado Center in Denver, is being co-hosted by the United Methodist Board of Church and Society and Commission on Religion and Race. Photo Courtesy of History Colorado.

Agencies host Sand Creek Massacre exhibit in DC

During Native American Heritage Month, the United Methodist Building will host a display that acknowledges a brutal part of church history as “both an act of confession and a witness of faith.”

Racism

Silence is complicity: Responding to racist mascots

The recent effort by President Trump to revive the former names of two professional sports franchises is traumatic for Native Americans.

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