Heather Bellow is reporting for The Berkshire Eagle tobacco, seashells, cedar and pollen are some of the earthly offerings cast into the Housatonic River on October 10, after more than 100 people prayed into them. An Indigenous Peoples' Day celebration began at the Great Barrington Town Hall Gazebo with singing and speaking before the preparation of the offering ended with a sacred ceremony and meditation at the river. It was a prayer to heal the river, suffering as it has from industrial pollution. “The water will know everything that we have been praying about, talking about,” said Jake Singer, Navajo Medicine Man, Sundance Chief and activist for Native American veterans. “The water is our mother.” They also remembered the slaughter of two dozen Narragansett people. and thought of Native American women and girls who are 10 times more likely than anyone else to go missing or be murdered. The gathering came after a third annual weekend of events organized by the Alliance for a Viable Future. The Alliance’s Founder and Executive Director, Lev Natan said a delegation of Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians and 15 tribal nations came together for the first time. So did the Northeast Indigenous Climate Council. For one of the nations, the weekend marked a gradual and recent homecoming after being pushed out of what is now the Berkshires, 250 years ago. Shawn Stevens, also Standing Eagle, chair of the Language and Culture Committee for the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans, said, “When we were made to leave these lands, we were not appreciated — we were not wanted here. But now when we come back we find an overwhelming group of people with open arms walking with us back, wanting us back, wanting to know our history, wanting to know our culture, wanting to know what wasn’t taught in schools back then.” Read the full story in The Berkshire Eagle.