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During a recent visit on April 25th, 2023 to the Field Museum, one of the best museums in all of Chicago, I stopped by the new Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories exhibit. I must say, it's a pretty good exhibit (perhaps my third favorite exhibit, only behind the Hall of Conservation and (one of the Museums's best and most accurate exhibits) the Evolving Planet)!!! The Native Truths exhibit shows and talks about the struggles and triumphs of the many Native American Nations from their origins to the modern day in blunt and extremely accurate ways. But there was one part of the exhibit that somewhat surprised me. It's a display case with several Late Cretaceous fossils from North and South Dakota alongside an interactive pad that talked about how the specimens were originally held by the Standing Rock Institute of Natural History. I'd never heard of the Standing Rock Institute of Natural History before. I was immediately intrigued but saddened to hear it closed due to lack of funding. I researched it a bit more and discovered it's located in Fort Yates, North Dakota. It's website is also apparently still up. https://srinstituteofnaturalhistory.com The museum was located in the heart of the Standing Rocks Reservation, home to the Hunkpapa, Sihasapa, Ihanktonwona, and Pabaksa bands of the Great Sioux Native American Nation. The Reservation itself is the result of the U.S. Government's continual and illicit breaking of Treaties with the regions Native American Tribes in order to grab as much of regions gold as possible in the 1870s-1890s. This is a very simplified explanation as to what happened as whole pages could be filled with with confirmed accounts of truly barbaric atrocities sections of the U.S. Government and the U.S. army inflicted on these Native American Nations at this period in time...something likely too graphic and horrifying to talk about on the forum. But I encourage you all to research it yourselves for if we don't learn or heed the lessons from history, we are doomed to repeat it. Anyways, from what could gather, the museum wasn't particularly large but still impressive in its own right. Opening in 2007, the Standing Rock Institute of Natural History is apparently the first tribal run museum to have it's own Paleontology Code of Ethics and at its height had 10,000 Paleontological specimens. I'm very sad to hear it closed due to lack of funding.

Dinosaurs, fossils and the experts who study them have all waited for an end to the shutdown. the Washington Post By Brian Switek, January 25, 2019 https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/dinosaurs-fossils-and-the-experts-who-study-them-have-all-waited-for-an-end-to-the-shutdown/2019/01/25/4dfddf80-20e4-11e9-8b59-0a28f2191131_story.html A publication of mine, which has been accepted and is in editing for publication and the planning for a conference volume, for which I have been invited to prepare a short paper all came to a grinding halt beacuse of this gridlock. That said, I am quite lucky because at least I am not a federal employee. One person, whom I know, changed jobs from a federal to state position in mid-December 0f 2018. I now have to apologize for suggesting that he was crazy to do so. Yours, Paul H.