Bucks hosted Gloria Lopez, Esq., former Fulbright Chair in Human Rights and Social Justice at the University of Ottawa, at a celebration honoring Native Americans during November’s Native American Heritage Month.
Bucks President Felicia Ganther greeted attendees, saying “We can come together, we can learn new things, we can expand our minds, and we can share the ties that bind us together as humans.”
The first Native American Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, said via video “This month we honor the gifts of our ancestors by celebrating indigenous knowledge, traditions, language and culture… We Center our work on the voices of indigenous people, as we address the missing and murdered indigenous people’s crisis.”
US indigenous population has doubled to almost 10 million for the 2020 census; Twenty two percent live on reservations. Unemployment and those living below the poverty level are consistently nearly double that of all Americans even though the federal budget allocates billions for Native American programs. Despite education subsidies, only 14.5 percent graduate from college.
A 2015 National Congress of American Indians found that as much as 40 percent of sex trafficking victims identify as American Indian, Alaska Native, or First Nations (AIANFN) and indigenous women suffer more violence and are murdered at 10 times the national rate.
Chief Vincett Mann, Chief of the Bucks Lenape, reminded us via video that our Bucks Newtown campus is housed on what was Lenape/ Delaware Indian land beginning 12,000 to 15,000 years ago. The Lenape are indigenous, people who have historic ancestral and cultural ties to the land.
The Delaware river was the Lenape Indian lifeline providing transportation, water, and food, so some also call the Delaware the Lenape.
Native Americans developed three-sisters-farming: first planting corn, next beans to grow up the corn stalks and provide nitrogen, finally squash…
Three young Native women dream of making positive changes in Indian County in the future. Courtesy of Lisa Long 
Delaware leaders prepare to unveil the 1778 Treaty of Fort Pitt, for view at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. From left to right: Denise Stonefish, chief of the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown; former museum director Kevin Gover; Chester “Chet” Brooks, chief of the Delaware Tribe of Indians; and Deborah Dotson, president of the Delaware Nation. May 10, 2018, Washington, D.C. Paul Morigi/AP Images for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian 
