infundibulum

Technorati sent me a link to an interesting article at the ever-awesome LJWorld.com (the little paper/media empire that Django built):

Split-apart nation comes together

The paper is about a family reunion, of sorts, and a long overdue one: the two parts of the Ponca tribe have been living as as two separate entities in Nebraska and Oklahoma since the 1870s.

I happened to stumbled across this history before, because I was digging around in the Wikipedia article on the Omaha, who speak a related Siouan language. This detail in the article caught my eye:

Congress terminated the tribe in Nebraska in the 1960s, and it was reinstated in 1990. The northern tribe is still feeling the effects of that period, as the Nebraska members have no fluent speakers of the Ponca language.

“In order for us to continue to be a strong nation, Poncas, we need to have that language. We need to have that culture,” Wright said.