American Indian

"The Probable Passing of Elk Creek," a one-hour documentary on a small mill town's struggle with the land rights of American Indians, will be shown at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Western Maryland College in Westminster.The film, free and open to the public, is part of the college's four-semester series, "The Legacy of Columbus: Indigenous Perspectives."The film will be shown in McDaniel Lounge, to be followed by a discussion led by Dr. Christianna Nichols Leahy, associate professor of political science at the college.

For Pat Stout, what started as a return on an investment with urban housing developers became an in-town address to enjoy on the weekends before finally morphing into her sole residence as well as the breathtaking repository for her vast collection of American Indian artifacts. Stout, a 70-year-old divorcee and owner of Baltimore Window Factory in Essex, enjoys a 3,000-square-foot unit in the Canal Street Malt House, a downtown reuse project built on the bones of the 1866 warehouse of the same name in Little Italy.

The term "Authentic American," usually reserved for selling items from cologne to movies, will take on a different meaning during the next three days of American Indian culture at the Howard County Fairgrounds.Here's where the indigenous is exotic.The American Indian Pow-Wow/Festival, a first for Howard County, will include dancers and drummers along with craft and food vendors. The overarching purpose of the gathering is to educate."You'd be surprised what people know absolutely nothing about Indian culture.

What's in a name? Shakespeare had a point when he had Juliet telling Romeo that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. " But don't tell that to the many Native Americans furious at the Pentagon for code-naming Osama bid Laden "Geronimo" in the raid that found and killed him. Members of that community have taken to pen, Internet and radio denouncing the usage, highlighted last Sunday by President Barack Obama on the CBS News show "60 Minutes....

Three Carroll churches will explore the sacred circle, the American Indian symbol for the interconnection of all things, as they celebrate World Community Day today."

The Indian leader called out the song in Comanche, and the Indians, some costumed, some in jeans and Western shirts, started a circle. The drum beat the rhythm, the dancers chanted, and a sound like that of a thousand crickets was made by the turtle shells and homemade metal shakers on the women's ankles as they shuffle-stepped around the circle. We were watching a traditional stomp dance at an American Indian powwow.There were eight of us there as part of a vacation program called Journeys into American Indian Territory.

A half-dozen elementary and middle school children -- all American Indians -- hummed around a room in a converted East Baltimore Street storefront last night, painting over a few remaining patches of white canvas and making sure the blades of grass looked just right.Their work was to put the finishing touches on a six-panel mural depicting contemporary Baltimore rowhouses and people strolling in Patterson Park, as well as scenes of traditional North Carolina Indian villages.Ten-year-old Amber Jones of the Lumbee tribe took a break from mixing the perfect blend of purple to recite a list of dignitaries she wants to see on the mural -- "Maybe the mayor, the president, the governor."

LOUANN REED LEARNED to make pottery from her grandmother while growing up in the Pueblo community of Acoma, N.M. Today, the 27-year-old potter makes her home in Arlington, Va., exhibiting her work in suburban galleries and sharing her talent at area festivals that celebrate Indian traditions.When Baltimore's third annual National Native American Cultural Arts Festival opens next week, Reed will be there to demonstrate the Acoma pottery technique to visitors of all backgrounds, but particularly, she hopes, to those of Indian descent.

Wardell Scott, 17, says he was a good student at Patterson High School, but he lost focus and was pressured into fights by rival teen factions.About two years ago, Wardell was kicked out of Patterson in his ninth-grade year because of disciplinary problems. And that, he says, was enough reason to leave school for good and help his father with masonry work. That is, until he was inspired to persevere.Wardell and other young American Indians in the Baltimore area are finding guidance in the Native American Mentoring Program, a big-brother, big-sister arrangement between adults from a variety of backgrounds and Indian children.

Archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians and volunteers who have been "digging" in the cavernous basements of the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania have made some remarkable finds that have not seen the light of day in nearly a century.The exhibition, "Beauty from the Earth," opens Nov. 10 and displays 135 pieces of Pueblo Indian pottery from the museum's collection, culled from well over 3,500 pieces collected at the turn of the century and stored in the museum's basement.

SATURDAY MARYLAND RENAISSANCE FESTIVAL: Hear ye, hear ye, it's time once again to drink mead, feast on food on sticks and flaunt your best chain mail. Surely, we joust on the festival grounds in Crownsville Saturdays, Sundays and Labor Day Monday through Oct. 25, 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Go to rennfest.com. BEAT THE HEAT: The Summer Massive dance party helps you chill out with cranking A.C., free snowballs and some other cool surprises at Paradox Nightclub, 1310 Russell St., from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. Spinning the chill tunes are Charles Feelgood, DJ Dara, Tittsworth, Benny Page, Swarm, ODI, Cannon Boys, DJ 2Rip and others.

Paul Lindsay introduced himself to an audience of students and staff at Roye-Williams Elementary School in Havre de Grace. But only his own son, Skylar understood the unfamiliar syllables. So Lindsay translated his name from the Mohawk language into English. Among American Indians, Lindsay is known as Eagle Owl Warrior. Skylar is He Who Flies with Hawks. Lindsay, 47, organized the school assembly, complete with some knowledgeable friends and lots of show-and-tell, in celebration of Native American Month.

Gary Scholl is always looking for new opportunities to teach people about American Indians. So when his wife, Kathy, a longtime docent at Hays House in Bel Air, was looking for ways to draw more visitors to the historic house, she suggested an educational event that involved the life and history of American Indians, he said. "There's a lot we can learn from Native American folks," said Scholl, 59, who is a vice principal at John Carroll School. "They give us another way of understanding the importance of family and community."

Two by two, they danced into a tent wearing elaborate feather headdresses, leather moccasins and bells tied to their ankles or knees. A circle of drummers played and chanted in the corner. Native Americans from Baltimore and across the country gathered in Patterson Park yesterday for the 34th Annual Powwow put on by the Baltimore American Indian Center. Participants included members of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe from North Carolina, Kiowa from Oklahoma and Lumbee from Baltimore. The three-day event, which ended yesterday, was designed to spotlight Native American culture.

Inevitably and sadly, Thanksgiving is the one day of the year when American Indians cross the minds of most other Americans. Other than at our yearly commemoration of Pilgrims and Indians giving thanks, in early elementary school, in occasional movies or as tourists in the Southwest, most Americans give about as much thought to - and have as much knowledge of - their country's first inhabitants as they do the people of Outer Mongolia. This needs to change. While America's 298 million non-Indians generally express good will and considerable sympathy about past injustices and present poverty afflicting Indians, they largely view the nation's Indians as relics of a past that ended with Custer and Wounded Knee.

Daniel Coates picked up a tool made from cedar, a beaver tooth, a clam shell and leather string. He aligned the tip of a six-foot spear with the beaver tooth, aimed and flung it. The spear zipped through the air about 60 feet, just missing a paper target attached to two hay bales stacked on the ground. "This is the way it all started ... early man hunted with nothing more than a thrust-type spear," Coates said after the demonstration in the front yard of his Havre de Grace home. The device is called an atlatl, and consists of a stick with a handle at one end and a hook that holds a light spear on the other.

WINDS BLEW warm across the field, and the skies were bright Dec. 1, when fourth-graders from Running Brook Elementary School put up a 20-foot tepee on school grounds.It would have been easy to imagine that the children were Native Americans from a Plains tribe, instead of Columbia youngsters studying history.The tepee-building project was part of a cultural arts program, "Journeys Into American Indian Territory," sponsored by Running Brook's PTA.The Howard County Arts Council and Wilde Lake Village Board provided additional funding for the project.

American Indian community leaders and contractors yesterday blasted efforts to tighten criteria under which Native Americans would qualify for participation in Baltimore's minority set-aside program."

BETHESDA -- Notah Begay III was standing on the first tee at Congressional Country Club yesterday afternoon, not pondering his impending pro-am tee shot but trying to figure out an appropriate story angle going into this week's AT&T National. "How about two old friends coming together to play golf in one of the most multicultural cities in the world?" Begay joked in reference to the tournament's host and his former Stanford teammate, Tiger Woods. How about this: What ever happened to one of golf's up-and-coming stars?

PHIL LUCAS, 65 Film producer Mr. Lucas, an award-winning film producer and director who made a career of telling the stories of American Indians, died Sunday in Bellevue, Wash., of complications after heart surgery, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Seattle Times. In his four decades as a filmmaker, Mr. Lucas wrote, produced or directed more than 100 feature films, television series and documentaries in an industry that often stereotyped Indians. Among them were The Broken Chain, about the Iroquois Confederacy, and The Honour of All, a documentary about how the Alkali Lake Indians in British Columbia became almost entirely sober in the 1980s after being 100 percent alcoholic 20 years before.