Boston Celtics star Kyrie Irving is set to visit the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, where his late mother was once part of the tribe.
The Rapid City Journal reports that the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe will hold a ceremony for Irving on Thursday in honor of his first visit to the reservation that straddles the North Dakota-South Dakota border.
The celebration will include a naming ceremony, performances, and community feed at the Prairie Knights Pavilion, a casino in Fort Yates, North Dakota.
Katz adds that the All-Star guard’s late mother, Elizabeth Ann Larson, was part of the tribe but was adopted out of it when she was a child. Irving’s grandmother and great-grandparents were citizens of Standing Rock as well.
Irving himself, meanwhile, has a Standing Rock tattoo on the back of his neck, and his recently-released signature shoe with Nike has a Standing Rock seal on the back. He also expressed support for the Native American community’s mass protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016.
