Free Republic

Native American campaigners are raising questions about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first-ever curator of Native American art — claiming she does not belong to a federally recognized tribe in the US, The Post has learned. Patricia Marroquin Norby was hired with great fanfare in 2020, after what the museum said was “a long and competitive search,” as its “inaugural Associate Curator of Native American Art” in its American Wing. For years, Marroquin Norby, 53, described herself — including in legal filings — as “Apache,” “Eastern Apache” and “Nde” as well as “Purepacha/Tarascan,” an indigenous group from the northwestern part...

OAXACA, Mexico — A small, homemade bomb exploded outside a Sears store in the troubled southern city of Oaxaca early Wednesday, damaging the entrance but causing no injuries, authorities reported. A similar bomb was found and deactivated outside the entrance of a nearby bank, state Attorney General Evencio Martinez told national radio station W Radio. "I believe it could be (the work of) local groups, given the type and style of device," Martinez said. He denied the bombs were related to the People's Revolutionary Army, a small leftist group that bombed gas pipelines in July. Sears in Mexico is operated...

Next week my daughter will go back to elementary school, and I will be faced with a choice. At some point the curriculum will cover the environment, and she'll be taught that before Europeans settled the Americas the Indians lived so lightly on the land that for all practical purposes the hemisphere was a wilderness. The forests and plains, the teacher will explain, were crowded with bison, beaver, and deer; the rivers, with fish; flights of passenger pigeons darkened the skies. The continent's few inhabitants walked beneath an endless forest of tall trees that had never been disturbed. But in...

An island for ancient elites has been found in central Mexico, archaeologists say. Among the ruins are a treasury and a small pyramid that may have been used for rituals. The island, called Apupato, belonged to the powerful Tarascan Empire, which dominated much of western Mexico from A.D. 1400 to 1520, before the European conquest of the region. "Because Apupato was an island and relatively unsettled, it is a neat window into how the [Lake Pátzcuaro] basin looked like years ago," said Christopher Fisher, lead investigator and archaeologist at Colorado State University.