Most scientists now reject the idea that the first Americans came by land
Researchers embrace the kelp highway hypothesis in “a dramatic intellectual turnabout.”

Annalee Newitz, Ars Technica 11/4/2017

It's been one of the most contentious debates in anthropology, and now scientists are saying it's pretty much over. A group of prominent anthropologists have done an overview of the scientific literature and declare in Science magazine that the "Clovis first" hypothesis of the peopling of the Americas is dead.

For decades, students were taught that the first people in the Americas were a group called the Clovis who walked over the Bering land bridge about 13,500 years ago. They arrived (so the narrative goes) via an ice-free corridor between glaciers in North America. But evidence has been piling up since the 1980s of human campsites in North and South America that date back much earlier than 13,500 years. At sites ranging from Oregon in the US to Monte Verde in Chile, evidence of human habitation goes back as far as 18,000 years.

In the 2000s, overwhelming evidence suggested that a pre-Clovis group had come to the Americans before there was an ice-free passage connecting Beringia to the Americas. As Smithsonian anthropologist Torben C. Rick and his colleagues put it, "In a dramatic intellectual turnabout, most archaeologists and other scholars now believe that the earliest Americans followed Pacific Rim shorelines from northeast Asia to Beringia and the Americas."

Now scholars are supporting the "kelp highway hypothesis," which holds that people reached the Americas when glaciers withdrew from the coasts of the Pacific Northwest 17,000 years ago, creating "a possible dispersal corridor rich in aquatic and terrestrial resources."

Attorney General Who Battled Trump, Attacks Tribal Treaty Rights
by Wakíƞyaƞ Waánataƞ, Last Real Indians

“We’ve never seen this assault on Treaty rights since Slade Gordon. I put him [Attorney General Bob Ferguson] right next to Slade. Slade lost, so will Ferguson.” Brian Cladoosby, Chairman Swinomish Tribe and President of the National Congress of American Indians

Last January, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, rose to national prominence when he filed a lawsuit against the Trump Administration’s Executive Order to temporarily ban refugees and immigrants from seven majority Muslim countries. A U.S. District Court would later agree with Ferguson and issued a Temporary Restraining Order halting the implementation nationwide.

Ferguson, who was hailed a hero and Trump fighter, is now turning his attacks on Northwest Tribes and their treaty rights.

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Trump’s Order Silences Alaskan Native Voices

Native American Rights Fund
April 28, 2017

Today President Trump, flanked by Alaska Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan and Representative Don Young, revoked a critically important Executive Order that we, 40 of Alaska’s coastal Tribes, had drafted and advocated for. Executive Order 13754: Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience, issued by President Obama on December 9, 2016, was the product of years of tireless work by local Alaskans, Tribes, and nonprofits who—when faced with the devastating effects of climate change and the dramatic increase of large scale shipping right on our front doorstep—sought to create a way for us to have a say in what happens in and to our waters. The key component of Order 13754 was the creation of the Bering Sea Intergovernmental Tribal Advisory Council. This Council gave us, local Alaskans who use the waters of the Bering Sea every day, a say in how the federal government managed those waters.

Today, the President took that away, along with all the other key components of the Order, including a provision to include traditional knowledge in federal decision-making. Now there is no seat at the table for Alaskans or our local knowledge. Alaska’s own congressional delegation stood by as local Alaskan voices were removed from decisions that affect our lives, and now we are at the mercy of federal decision-makers only. This does not benefit Alaska. Rather, it only benefits the federal government and private interests who will financially benefit from silencing our voices and taking or polluting the resources that we, as Alaskans, rely on.