In the final weeks of the 2024 election, Native American organizers are intensifying efforts to increase voter turnout, recognizing the impact of the Native vote, especially in swing states like Arizona and Wisconsin.

Advocacy groups like the Native American Rights Fund continue to address barriers to the ballot box, such as isolation, poor infrastructure and limited internet access, along with restrictions on in-person voter registration and early voting.

New challenges in Arizona

Arizona, home to 22 Native tribes, played a key role in the 2020 Democratic victory.

However, a recent voter registration glitch in the state may affect up to 218,000 voters, more than double previous estimates. The issue stems from an error in the driver's license database that flagged some individuals as having proved citizenship when they had not.

A recording obtained by The Washington Post revealed concerns among Arizona Democratic leaders about how resolving the error could either disenfranchise voters or spark conspiracy theories. Despite the glitch, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that those affected can still vote in federal and state elections.

Jaynie Parrish, executive director of Arizona Native Vote, said the impact on Native voters remains unclear. She stressed that Native Americans face ongoing challenges when voting, including Arizona's requirement to show proof of a physical address at the polls.

“We rely on post office boxes,” Parrish said, explaining that early voters can use a driver's license or tribal I.D. “We just have to keep reminding our community what identification they need for Election Day. Our best defense is offense.”

Voting based on issues, not party

University of New Mexico Professor Gabriel R. Sanchez said Native American voting preferences haven’t been well-studied.

“The assumption that they are overwhelmingly Democrat isn’t backed by data,” Sanchez told VOA.

His polling shows the majority of Native voters lean Democratic but not as strongly as other minority groups like Black and Latino voters. In the 2020 election, 60% of Native Americans supported Joe Biden, but this dropped slightly by 2022.

“Native voters tell us they aren’t really partisan,” Sanchez said. “They evaluate which party better addresses tribal issues each election cycle.”

As an example, in an editorial Monday in the Navajo Times, Francine Bradley-Arthur, a Navajo organizer and co-founder of Freedom House in St. Michaels, Arizona, explains why many Navajos support Donald Trump.

“In Navajo culture, life is sacred, including life in the womb,” she writes. “Trump’s administration upheld pro-life values that resonate deeply with our traditions.”

She recalls that as attorney general of California, Kamala Harris opposed “at least 15 tribal land-into-trust applications,” undermining the tribes’ ability to reclaim lost land.

The Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign this week launched an initiative to better engage Native communities through culturally appropriate outreach. Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan announced the program Wednesday during an October 2 event hosted by the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community.

"Vice President Harris has been a fierce advocate for tribal sovereignty, working to secure funding for health care, education and economic development that truly empowers our communities. … And let's not forget her running mate, who I have the privilege of knowing a thing or two about," Flanagan told reporters during a press call later in the day.

Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, was elected alongside Governor Tim Walz in 2018 and reelected in 2022. Native American voters are mindful that if the Harris-Walz ticket succeeds, she would become the first Native American woman to serve as a state governor.

VP candidates’ debate

On October 1, vice presidential candidates Walz and JD Vance debated key topics like immigration and abortion. Native commentators expressed disappointment on a Facebook discussion hosted by Native News Online, noting the debate overlooked issues crucial to Native voters, such as tribal sovereignty and climate change.

Judith LeBlanc, Caddo Tribe member and director of the Native Organizers Alliance, said she was disappointed Walz didn’t highlight his work with Flanagan.

Aaron Payment, former chair of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, pointed out that Native voters in swing states can help Democrats win.

"Are candidates concerned that if they start talking pro-Indian, then all of a sudden they're going to be considered radical or … in the back pocket of American Indians?" Payment asked.

Trump's proposal

The candidates did discuss Trump’s plan to open federal land for housing construction. LeBlanc criticized this proposal in a Native News Online editorial, calling it an overreach and warning that it could lead to seizing tribal lands for development.

During the Facebook discussion, Levi Rickert, editor of Native News Online, shifted focus to the Montana Senate debate between Jon Tester and Republican Tim Sheehy.

Sheehy has faced criticism for past racially charged remarks about the Crow Tribe.Tester confronted Sheehy, telling him to apologize for his comments. Sheehy admitted his remarks were insensitive, blaming them on military culture.

Payment noted that Sheehy's support has increased in Montana, but with Native Americans making up 6.4% of the vote, it could still swing.

The largest dam removal project in U.S. history was completed Wednesday, marking a major victory for tribes in the region who fought for decades to free hundreds of miles of the Klamath River near the California-Oregon border.

Through protests, testimony and lawsuits, local tribes showcased the environmental devastation due to the four towering hydroelectric dams, especially to salmon, which are culturally and spiritually significant to tribes in the region. The dams cut salmon off from their historic habitat and caused them to die in alarming numbers because of bad water-quality conditions.

Without the tribes' work "to point out the damage that these dams were doing, not only to the environment, but to the social and cultural fabric of these tribal nations, there would be no dam removal," said Mark Bransom, chief executive of the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, the nonprofit entity created to oversee the project.

Power company PacifiCorp built the dams to generate electricity between 1918 and 1962. But the structures halted the natural flow of the waterway that was once known as the third-largest salmon-producing river on the West Coast. They disrupted the life cycle of the region's salmon, which spend most of their life in the Pacific Ocean but return to the chilly mountain streams to lay eggs.

At the same time, the dams produced only a small fraction of PacifiCorp's energy at full capacity — enough to power about 70,000 homes. They also didn't provide irrigation, drinking water or flood control, according to Klamath River Renewal Corporation.

Since breaching the dams, salmon regained access to their habitat, water temperature decreased and its quality improved, said Michael Belchik, senior water policy analyst for the Yurok Tribe.

But tribal advocates and activists see their work as far from finished, with some already refocusing their efforts on revegetation and other restoration work on the Klamath River and the surrounding land.

Here's a look at just a few of the many tribal members at the center of this struggle for dam removal:

'I really felt an urgency'

When Karuk tribal member Molli Myers took her first major step into the fight for Klamath dam removal, she was six months pregnant, had a toddler in tow and was in a foreign country for the first time. It was 2004 and she had organized a group of about 25 tribal members to fly to Scotland for the annual general stockholders meeting for Scottish Power, PacifiCorp's parent company at the time.

For hours, they protested outside with signs, sang and played drums. They cooked fish on Calton Hill over a fire of scotch barrels and gave it out to locals as they explained why they were there.

"I really felt an urgency because I was having babies," said Myers, who was born and raised in the middle Klamath in a traditional fishing family. "And so for me I was internalizing the responsibility to take care of their future."

The initial trigger for her to act came two years before that when she saw some of the tens of thousands of salmon die in the river from a bacterial outbreak caused by low water and warm temperatures.

"Looking back on it now I wonder where would we be if that hadn't happened," said Myers, 41. "Looking back on it now I can say, 'Was this our creator's call to action?' "

She spent the next two decades protesting and flooding state and federal meetings with tribal testimony, including waiting with other tribal members at the doors of a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting at 4 a.m. in 2007 to ask Warren Buffett what he was going to do about the dams. PacifiCorp was at that point part of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. conglomerate.

Today, those same children with her in Scotland are 21 and 19, and with the dams gone Myers said she sees the hope they and her other three children have about the future.

"They can do whatever needs to get done because they saw it happen, they lived it, so now there's no impossible for them," she said.

'His vision became reality'

For Yurok elder Jacqueline Winter, her feelings on the newly free-flowing river are more complicated. The 89-year-old's son, Troy Fletcher, was the tribe's point person for dam removal for two decades, testifying in front of the U.S. Congress and presenting to state and federal regulatory committees.

But his true power came through his ability to bring people with radically conflicting viewpoints — from farmers to commercial fishers to tribal members — together. Winter said that came from his belief that everyone living along the river are relatives and deserve to be heard.

"We're all family. None of us can be left hurting and all of us have to give a little," she said was his message.

But at 53, the former executive director for the Yurok Tribe died unexpectedly from a heart attack, nearly a decade before that vision of a free-flowing river would finally be realized. Winter said when she saw the dams breached last month, it felt like his spirit was there through those he touched and she could finally let him go.

"His vision became reality and I think he never doubted it," she said. "He never doubted it. And those who worked closely with him never doubted it."

'Protect those fish'

Former Klamath Tribes Chairman Jeff Mitchell's work since the 1970s for dam removal came out of the belief that the salmon are their relatives.

"They were gifted to us by our creator and given to us to preserve and to protect and also to help give us life," said Mitchell, chair of the tribe's Culture and Heritage Committee. "As such, the creator also instructed us to make sure that we do everything in our power to protect those fish."

The Klamath River's headwaters lie on the tribe's homelands in Oregon, and members once depended on salmon for 25% of their food. But for more than a century their waters have not held any salmon, he said.

Mitchell and other tribal members' fight to bring them back has cycled through several forms. There were the years of protesting, even gathering carcasses of fish after the 2002 fish kill and leaving them on the doorsteps of federal office buildings. There were his days of walking the halls of the state Legislature in Salem, Oregon, meeting with lawmakers about the millions in funding needed to make dam removal happen.

Today, he said he feels like they achieved the impossible, but there's still more work to do.

"I'm happy that the dams are gone and we have passage," he said. "But now I'm thinking about what are those fish coming home to. And that's really the focus now, is how do we get the parties to start taking restoration actions and making that the top priority in all of this?"

The remains of nine more Native American children who died at a notorious government-run boarding school in Pennsylvania over a century ago were disinterred from a small Army cemetery and returned to families, authorities said Wednesday.

The remains were buried on the grounds of the Carlisle Barracks, home of the U.S. Army War College. The children attended the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their families and forced to assimilate to white society as a matter of U.S. policy.

The Office of Army Cemeteries said it concluded the remains of nine children found in the graves were "biologically consistent" with information contained in their student and burial records. The remains were transferred to the children's families. Most have already been reburied on Native lands, Army officials said Wednesday.

Workers also disinterred a grave thought to have belonged to a Wichita tribe child named Alfred Charko, but the remains weren't consistent with those of a 15-year-old boy, the Army said. The remains were reburied in the same grave, and the grave was marked unknown. Army officials said they would try to locate Alfred's gravesite.

"The Army team extends our deepest condolences to the Wichita and Affiliated Tribe," Karen Durham-Aguilera, executive director of the Office of Army Cemeteries, said in a statement. "The Army is committed to seeking all resources that could lead us to more information on where Alfred may be located and to help us identify and return the unknown children in the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery."

The nine children whose remains were returned were identified Wednesday as Fanny Chargingshield, James Cornman and Samuel Flying Horse, from the Oglala Sioux Tribe; Almeda Heavy Hair, Bishop L. Shield and John Bull, from the Gros Ventre Tribe of the Fort Belknap Indian Community; Kati Rosskidwits, from the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes; Albert Mekko, from the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma; and William Norkok, from the Eastern Shoshone Tribe.

The Army declined to release details on one grave disinterment, saying the tribe asked for privacy.

More than 10,000 children from more than 140 tribes passed through the school between 1879 and 1918, including Olympian Jim Thorpe. Founded by an Army officer, the school cut their braids, dressed them in military-style uniforms, punished them for speaking their native languages and gave them European names.

The children — often taken against the will of their parents — endured harsh conditions that sometimes led to death from tuberculosis and other diseases. The remains of some of those who died were returned to their tribes. The rest are buried in Carlisle.

Candidate Trump makes big promise to unrecognized NC tribe

Former President Donald Trump, speaking at a campaign rally in Wilmington, N.C., on Saturday, promised that if elected again, he would grant the Lumbee tribe federal recognition, along with access to federal benefits, services and protections.

"The Lumbee Tribe has been wrongfully denied federal recognition for more than a century," Trump said. "We're going to fix it. We'll fix it right at the beginning."

Historically, the tribe has been known by several names, including Tuscarora, Croatan, Cheraw and Cherokee. In 1953, they changed their name from "Cherokee Indians of Robeson County" to the "Lumbee Indians of North Carolina."

In her book "The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle", University of North Carolina history professor Malinda Maynor Lowery, a member of the Lumbee community, describes the tribe as descendants of several tribes in eastern North Carolina, as well as free European and enslaved African settlers who lived in the tribe's homeland.

In 1956, Public Law 570, also known as the "Lumbee Act," acknowledged the tribe as an "admixture of colonial blood with certain coastal tribes of Indians" but denied them federal services. In the 1990s, the Department of the Interior rejected their petition for federal recognition because they could not prove cultural, political or genealogical ties to any historic tribe.

The Lumbee tribe has repeatedly sought federal recognition through Congress but has never succeeded in getting Senate approval. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), the only federally recognized tribe in North Carolina, opposes Lumbee recognition.

"It's not just the Lumbee," former ECBI Chief Richard Sneed told VOA in 2022. "It's any group trying to bypass the Office of Federal Acknowledgment. Congress isn't equipped to do the necessary research to determine whether a group is an authentic historic tribe."

The Lumbee tribe did not respond to VOA's request for comment.

Navy apologizes to Tlingit for historic attacks

The U.S. Navy has formally apologized for its 1869 bombardment of the Alaska Native village of Kake, more than 140 years after the attack. During a ceremony held in Kake on Sunday, Rear Admiral Mark B. Sucato expressed the Navy's regret, marking the first of two planned apologies for military actions against Alaska Native communities in the late 1800s.

The attacks on Kake and Angoon occurred shortly after the U.S. acquired Alaska from Russia in 1867, when the U.S. Army and Navy were patrolling the region. Sailors aboard the USS Saginaw fired on Kake's three villages and two forts, completely destroying the community. The Navy acknowledged that, following the bombardment, landing parties set the village ablaze, causing the death of "possibly one elderly Kake woman" and leaving many villagers to die of exposure during the harsh winter.

The attack on Kake was triggered by the killing of two Tlingit men by a sentry, which may have led to the killing of two settlers, prompting the USS Saginaw to be dispatched to "seize a few of their chiefs as hostages" and "burn their villages." While no one died during the bombardment itself, the destruction of food supplies and shelters led to many deaths from starvation.

Thirteen years later, the Navy bombarded the village of Angoon following a dispute over the death of a Tlingit traditional healer. When the tribe's request for compensation was denied, Commander Edgar Merriman ordered the bombing.

A second ceremony is scheduled for October 26 to commemorate the anniversary of the Angoon bombardment.

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Judge rules tribes, conservation groups cannot join national monument lawsuit

A legal battle has erupted between Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs and the Republican-controlled state legislature over President Joe Biden's 2023 designation of the Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument.

The land, considered sacred by several Northern Arizona tribes, was protected from future mining under the monument's designation. All 22 of Arizona's federally recognized tribes contributed to the drafting of the monument designation, but Republicans argue that the designation exceeds presidential authority and violates the Arizona Wilderness Act of 1984, as some wilderness-designated lands fall within the national monument's boundaries.

U.S. District Court Judge Stephen McNamee allowed Hobbs and Attorney General Kris Mayes to intervene in the case, as they argue that only the state's executive branch, led by Hobbs, has the authority to sue on behalf of the state's interests. The Biden administration contends that only Congress can reverse a national monument designation, and that state lawmakers lack the legal standing to sue.

While Hobbs and Mayes were granted participation, the judge denied requests from Native American tribes and environmental groups to join the defense. A trial date has yet to be set.

"Baaj Nwaavjo" means "where tribes roam" in the Havasupai language, while "I'tah Kukveni" translates to "our footprints" in Hopi.

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Bodies of Indian boarding school students make their journey home

More than 130 years ago, three Oglala Lakota youths from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota traveled by train to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.

But James Cornman, Samuel Flying Horse (also known as Tasunke Kinyela) and Fannie Charging Shield, like dozens of other Carlisle students, contracted tuberculosis, a disease that thrived in crowded school dormitories. They were buried in the school cemetery until this week, when a delegation from Pine Ridge arrived to take them home.

The car carrying their remains returned to South Dakota, making stops at the Yankton and Rosebud reservations before traveling in a procession through Pine Ridge.

Amanda Takes War Bonnett-Beauvais, whose ancestor Thomas Marshall was also buried at Carlisle, was among those who gathered in the town of Martin to pay their respects.

“It's an event that's really emotionally sad, but at the same time, it's a really educational event because it brings forth what happened in the boarding school era,” she told VOA. “Even though it's a historical thing that had happened 130 years ago, the effects of what those kids, their families, endured are still ringing into our family infrastructures today.”

The children’s remains were taken to a reservation funeral home; tribe members and descendants will meet Monday to discuss where they will be buried.

Did feds use, dispose of toxic chemicals on Nevada reservation?

The Associated Press this week revealed evidence that the federal government may have used component chemicals of the toxic herbicide Agent Orange (AO) as weed control on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Nevada.

The Shoshone-Paiute tribes who make their home at Duck Valley have long struggled with widespread illness and cancer, which they believe is linked to contamination of soil and water by pesticides and other chemical waste.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) managed the reservation until 1993. During the 1950s, BIA operated a maintenance shop on the reservation and improperly disposed of diesel and other oils by pumping them into the earth through a shallow injection well.

Tests on samples from the sump, soil and floor drains around the building revealed that BIA had stored a dangerous assortment of chemicals, including waste oil, arsenic, copper, lead, cadmium and AO components.

Although new wells were installed in 1992, the community was exposed to contaminated water for years, leading to numerous cancer deaths, particularly among former school staff and students.

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Tribes lack resources to fight climate change along Pacific Northwest coastline

Over two dozen tribal nations along the Oregon and Washington coasts face climate challenges such as rising sea levels, ocean acidification, extreme heat, increased wildfire risk and declining mountain snowpack.

A recent report from the Tribal Coastal Resilience Portfolio of the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative shows that tribes have drawn up plans for combating extreme weather events, but they lack the funds, partnerships, technical assistance and personnel to put plans into action.

“Some of the challenges that we face on the coast are due to the magnitude of some of the projects that we need to undertake,” Quinault Indian Nation Natural Resources Technical Adviser Gary Morishima told the collaborative during one of a series of listening sessions conducted among more than a dozen Pacific Northwest tribes.

The Quinault tribe, for example, is working to relocate two villages vulnerable to climate change.

“That’s a multimillion-dollar, multiagency effort,” Morishima told the collaborative. “It’s very difficult to integrate our plans and priorities for village relocation with those of the agencies and constraints on available funding.”

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Crackdown on fake sober living homes push hundreds into Arizona streets

ProPublica and the Arizona Center for Investigative Journalism this week reported that a crackdown on fraudulent addiction facilities — so-called “sober living homes” — in the city of Phoenix has left hundreds of mostly Native American men and women homeless with no access to care.

As VOA reported in February 2023, fraudulent substance abuse providers targeted, lured and sometimes kidnapped Native Americans into sober homes across the city, billing Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) for services never rendered.

In October 2023, AHCCCS suspended the licenses of 12 sober living centers, adding to the list of more than 300 centers shut down by the state in 2023 because of allegations of Medicare fraud.

Thirty of the providers accused of fraud have been cleared to reopen and once again bill Medicaid for reimbursements.

“This is far from over, Navajo activist Reva Stewart told VOA Wednesday. “People are still getting recruited. People are still dying.

She shared video (above) that she said shows a group of recruiters coercing an intoxicated man into a transport van.

“Every morning, just on my way to work, I see like 20 to 25 Native people just hanging out by the Indian hospital,” she said.

Operators of fraudulent sober homes are known to frequent the Phoenix Indian Health Center and other locations, luring addicts and the homeless with promises of a warm bed and treatment.

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North Carolina Cherokees open state’s only marijuana dispensary

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina launched its first ever adult recreational marijuana sales on September 7, taking advantage of tribal sovereignty in a state where growing, possessing, using or selling cannabis products is illegal.

More than 4,000 customers showed up at the Great Smoky Cannabis Company in the Qualla Boundary; some waited in line for hours to purchase from a menu of 350 products.

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