The nearshore areas along the Strait and being remade as silt, sand and gravel move downstream from the former lakebeds once locked up behind the dams. Tom Roorda has given us permission to share this photo he took from the air on January 16th. A story in the Peninsula Daily News explains what we see.

Louise Erdrich won the 2012 National Book Award for her novel, The Round House. It's really really good reading, and (beware) really really depressing. Set in Chippewa country, in 1988, it references events and characters in her earlier novel, The Plague of Doves. Likewise really really good, and really really depressing. We have both titles, and a good many of her other books, including her The Birchbark House series for middle-school readers (which some of us thought were boring, nothing like her dynamite work for adults; love to hear some other opinions on this...)

We have it in the library now.

On a day to day basis, what the community is interested in is the computers—right now every machine is occupied—, the DVDs, and the newspapers. We have a lot of new DVDs on their way into the collection. Once they are processed, we will have more than 700 DVDs altogether. We'll let you know when the new ones are in the catalog and ready to go.

The Peninsula Daily News gets a lot of action, and some of the papers and newsletters from other tribes.

But we also try to keep up with the books we should have on native history and Klallam cultural topics, and are absolutely thrilled to let you know that Dr. Montler's Klallam Dictionary has been published. It's beautiful, it's huge (987 pages), and it embodies decades of careful work with our elders. The book hasn't been processed for the library yet, but you are welcome to stop by any time to take a look at it.

Meanwhile, winter has come. The gulls on the roof of the tribal center don't seem very excited about it.

P.S. Louise Erdrich, Ojibwe author, has won the National Book Award for her novel, The Round House. We are working on getting a copy. Meanwhile we have a good many of her other books.

We've added more than a hundred DVDs in the past couple of months. Many of them have been donated. About a dozen just came in that are native-related, with more to come.