Once again our Longhouse has done an outstanding job on our float and costumes and won the Independence Home Day’s, “Best of Parade” trophy.    I would like to thank the dads that worked hard to make our fantastic float.  I want to give a special thanks to Sachem “Smoking Gun” Kurtz, and Tony Filipovic for their extra effort.  Our members wore many great costumes, but Nick Mihalich and his robot costume were a crowd favorite.  I heard many people comment “Look at that Robot”.  What a great way to start the year.  The booth was also successful.  Thanks to all the dads and children that stepped up to run our booth.

The Summer Campout was a well attended family event.  On Saturday, our campers and a number of members that drove down to Mohican for the day took a canoe ride down the Mohican River.  The potluck dinner on Saturday night was absolutely wonderful and worked out very well with more than enough food for everyone.  At night we had a fantastic bonfire, which was the talk of the camp.

The Rain Gods must like the Brecksville Home Days because once again they visited this event.  Brecksville Home Days was a big success despite Saturday’s rain.  All our tribes stepped up and manned our booth for the 3 days.  We gave away a lot of prizes, talked to a lot of people about the CVNSND organization and earned some money for our wampum. 

We had another great day for our Pool Party.  The Apache tribe added a few new twists, a water balloon toss and a diving contest, to make an already fun event better.  A few brave dads joined in on the diving competition which quickly turned into a belly flip competition.  After a few rounds we were down to our two finalists, Gary “Dancing Buckeye” Pitzer & J.T.” Smoking Gun” Kurtz.  It was a close match but “Smoking Gun finally took the honors with his famous “Spread Eagle Leap of Death”.  

We are again into our recruiting season and we will send home information to all the new students, but our best recruiting tool is our members.  Please talk about the program with parents that you meet.  Invite them to our Recruiting Rally on Sept. 8th at the Meadows Picnic area in the Metroparks to see what CVNSND is about.  Your children can help by wearing their Native Sons and Daughters apparel to the first few weeks of school and telling their friends about all the fun we have.  If you know someone with older kids in the 2-4 grades that think it is too late to get involved, let them know that every year we have kids join in these later years and the only regret from the dads is that they didn’t join sooner.

I also wanted to congratulate Kenn Synek, who stepped up and accepted the job as National Longhouse Wampum Bearer.   Kenn is the first National Officer from our Longhouse.

We have some great events planned this fall: Recruiting Rally, Fall Harvest Hayride/Orientation, Fall Campout, Rain Gutter Regatta and Ice Skating.  Make sure you set some time aside for “Creating Memories Together”.

Chief “Howling Coyote” Wisniewski