Native Americans
Native American news roundup, March 31-April 6, 2024
Updated standards on race and ethnicity data will benefit Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders
The federal government’s Office of Management and Budget has revised standards for collecting and presenting race data to ensure the diversity of the U.S. population is adequately represented.
Among the most affected will be Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, who have previously been lumped into a single category. Now they will be allowed to identify as, for example, Fijian, Tahitian, Samoan or Chuukese.
Members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, or CAPAC, described the changes as a “historic milestone” for Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, or AANHPI, communities.
“As CAPAC has consistently emphasized, grouping our AANHPI communities together often masks the disparities that certain racial or ethnic groups face, including on economic prosperity, health outcomes, home ownership or educational attainment, and make government programs and services less responsive and effective,” said CAPAC chair, U.S. Representative Judy Chu, a Democrat from California.
Read the White House announcement here:
Governor, tribes, continue to clash in South Dakota
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem released a statement Tuesday calling on tribes to “banish cartels from tribal lands.”
“The cartels instigate drug addiction, murder, rape, human trafficking and so much more in tribal communities across the nation, including in South Dakota,” Noem said.
She has repeatedly suggested that tribal leaders are misusing federal funds. She has also criticized President Joe Biden for failing to adequately fund tribal law enforcement.
During a special session in January, Noem told state lawmakers that South Dakota has been “directly affected” by an invasion of drug and human traffickers from the southern U.S. border and that cartels were working inside reservations in the state.
In a March town hall meeting, she alleged that tribal leaders were personally profiting from cartels.
Noem has also called for the government to conduct “public and comprehensive single audits” of all federal funds allocated to South Dakota’s nine Native American tribes.
The Single Audit Act requires an annual audit of all nonfederal entities, including tribes that spend over $750,000 in Federal Financial Assistance.
Indian Country Today reports that a search of the Federal Audit Clearinghouse shows that most South Dakota tribes regularly completed audits — at least up until 2020, when “an influx of funding for COVID-19 relief caused issues backlogging the process and overwhelming the treasurers.”
This week’s statement noted that following Noem’s call for an audit, “multiple members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, including tribal councilmembers, unveiled serious allegations of corruption within tribal government.”
"Video of these comments will be made available upon request," it said.
At VOA’s request, Noem’s press secretary sent four video clips but failed to specify where they came from or how they were obtained.
VOA determined that they had been clipped from Oglala Lakota Sioux, or OST, tribal council meetings March 26-27 as seen on KOLC- TV's YouTube page, in which council members alleged the misuse of federal emergency funds by the tribe’s housing authority and questioned why the tribe was contracting to hire “Mexicans from Texas” when unemployment on the reservation stands at 80%, among other complaints.
Tribal leaders in South Dakota have expressed outrage over her remarks, accusing her of being racist and working to perpetuate stereotypes.
This week, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe banned her from their reservation, following in the footsteps of the OST, which banned her from Pine Ridge in February.
Handful of Native American tribes will experience total solar eclipse
On Monday, a total solar eclipse will cross the United States from Texas to New York. Anyone inside its 115-mile-wide path (185 kilometers) of totality will be able to see the moon fully block the face of the sun. Anyone outside of that path will see a partial eclipse.
A map of the eclipse’s path reveals that tribal nations in only four states will experience totality: the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe in Texas, the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma, some Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in New York and the Penobscot Nation in Maine.
The federal government recognizes 574 tribes, 347 of them in the lower 48 states.
No federally recognized tribes reside in the other states over which the eclipse will travel. Those states are Arkansas, Tennessee, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania — landscapes where prior contact and policies of forced removal eliminated hundreds of vibrant Indigenous communities.
Nor do any federally recognized tribes remain in Vermont, New Hampshire, Georgia, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, the District of Columbia or West Virginia.
"Rezbians" addresses same-sex love on reservations
VOA reporter Gustavo Martinez Contreras reported this week on an Indigenous graphic artist in New Mexico who is using a comic book to tell a story about same-sex love and identity on a Native American reservation.
Native American artist tells tale of love, identity
An Indigenous graphic artist in the Southwest U.S. state of New Mexico is using a comic book to tell a story about same-sex love and identity on a Native American reservation. Gustavo Martínez Contreras has our story from Albuquerque.
Uranium being mined near Grand Canyon as prices soar
The largest uranium producer in the United States is ramping up work just south of Grand Canyon National Park on a long-contested project that comes as global instability and growing demand drive uranium prices higher.
The Biden administration and dozens of other countries have pledged to triple the capacity of nuclear power worldwide in their battle against climate change, and policy changes are being adopted by some to lessen Russia's influence over the supply chain.
But as the U.S. pursues its nuclear power potential, environmentalists and Native American leaders remain fearful of the consequences for communities near mining and milling sites in the West and are demanding more regulatory oversight.
The new mining at Pinyon Plain Mine near the Grand Canyon is happening within the boundaries of the Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukv National Monument that was designated in August by President Joe Biden. The work was allowed to move forward since Energy Fuels Inc. had valid existing rights.
Low impact with zero risk to groundwater is how Energy Fuels spokesperson Curtis Moore describes the project.
The mine will cover 6.8 hectares (16.8 acres) and operate for just a few years, producing about 907,000 kilograms (about 2 million pounds) of uranium — enough to power the state of Arizona for at least a year with carbon-free electricity, he said.
"As the global outlook for clean, carbon-free nuclear energy strengthens and the U.S. moves away from Russian uranium supply, the demand for domestically sourced uranium is growing," Moore said.
Energy Fuels, which also is prepping two more mines in Colorado and Wyoming, was awarded a contract in 2022 to sell $18.5 million in uranium concentrates to the U.S. government to help establish the nation's strategic reserve for when supplies might be disrupted.
Amid the growing appetite for uranium, a coalition of Native Americans testified before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in late February, asking the panel to pressure the U.S. government to overhaul outdated mining laws and prevent further exploitation of marginalized communities.
Carletta Tilousi, who served for years on the Havasupai Tribal Council, said she and others have written countless letters to state and federal agencies and have sat through hours of meetings with regulators and lawmakers. Her tribe's reservation lies in a gorge off the Grand Canyon.
"We have been diligently participating in consultation processes," she said. "They hear our voices. There's no response."
Numerous legal challenges aimed at stopping the Pinyon Plain Mine repeatedly have been rejected by the courts, and top officials in the Biden administration are reticent to weigh in beyond speaking generally about efforts to improve consultation with Native American tribes.
It's just the latest battle over energy development and sacred lands, as tribes in Nevada and Arizona are fighting the federal government over the mining of lithium and the siting of renewable energy transmission lines.
The Havasupai are concerned mining could affect water supplies, wildlife, plants and geology throughout the Colorado Plateau, and the Colorado River flowing through the Grand Canyon and its tributaries are vital to millions of people across the West.
For the Havasupai, their water comes from aquifers deep below the mine.
The Pinyon Plain Mine, formerly known as the Canyon Mine, was permitted in 1984. With existing rights, it was grandfathered into legal operation despite a 20-year moratorium placed on uranium mining in the Grand Canyon region by the Obama administration in 2012.
The U.S. Forest Service in 2012 reaffirmed an environmental impact statement that had been prepared for the mine years earlier, and state regulators signed off on air and aquifer protection permitting within the last two years.
"We work extremely hard to do our work at the highest standards," Moore said. "And it's upsetting that we're vilified like we are. The things we're doing are backed by science and the regulators."
The regional aquifers feeding the springs at the bottom of the Grand Canyon are deep — around 304 meters (nearly 1,000 feet) below the mine — and separated by nearly impenetrable rock, Moore said.
State regulators also have said the area's geology is expected to provide an element of natural protection against water from the site migrating toward the Grand Canyon.
Still, environmentalists say the mine raises bigger questions about the Biden administration's willingness to adopt favorable nuclear power policies.
Using nuclear power to reach emissions goals is a hard sell in the western U.S. From the Navajo Nation to Ute Mountain Ute and Oglala Lakota homelands, tribal communities have deep-seated distrust of uranium companies and the federal government as abandoned mines and related contamination have yet to be cleaned up.
Taylor McKinnon, the Center for Biological Diversity's Southwest director, said allowing mining near the Grand Canyon "makes a mockery of the administration's environmental justice rhetoric."
"It's literally a black eye for the Biden administration," he said.
Teracita Keyanna with the Red Water Pond Road Community Association got choked up while testifying before the human rights commission in Washington, D.C., saying federal regulators proposed keeping onsite soil contaminated by past operations in New Mexico rather than removing it.
"It's really unfair that we have to deal with this and my children have to deal with this and later on, my grandchildren have to deal with this," she said. "Why is the government just feeling like we're disposable. We're not."
In Congress, some lawmakers who come from communities blighted by past contamination are digging in their heels.
Congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri said during a congressional meeting in January that lawmakers can't talk about expanding nuclear energy in the U.S. without first dealing with the effects that nuclear waste has had on minority communities. In Bush's district in St. Louis, waste was left behind from the uranium refining required by the top-secret Manhattan Project.
"We have a responsibility to both fix — and learn from — our mistakes," she said, "before we risk subjecting any other communities to the same exposure."
Native American News Roundup, March 24-30, 2024
Supreme Court rejects "cancel culture" case
The U.S. Supreme Court this week declined to hear former Kentucky high school student Nick Sandmann's case against several major media outlets for their coverage of his encounter with an Omaha tribe member at an anti-abortion rally in Washington.
Sandmann was part of a Catholic high school group attending the 2019 March for Life rally at the Lincoln Memorial. After a video of his face-to-face encounter with activist Nathan Phillips went viral, his family filed lawsuits against The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major media groups, accusing them of defamatory media reports.
Sandmann argued that his reputation was harmed by media reports of his interaction with Phillips, who was taking part in the Indigenous People's March at the same location.
In Sandmann's appeal to the Supreme Court, his lawyer said the case has "come to epitomize the high-water mark of the 'cancel culture.'" He also said Sandmann went from a "quiet, anonymous teenager into a national social pariah, one whose embarrassed smile in response to Phillips' aggression became a target for anger and hatred."
Read more:
South Dakota governor calls on feds to audit tribes in state
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem this week called on the Biden administration to conduct "public and comprehensive single audits" of all federal funds that have been given to the nine Native American tribes in that state.
In a statement released Tuesday, Noem said the audits would verify the need for the federal government to provide tribes with additional law enforcement resources.
"Law enforcement in Indian Country is failing to meet basic safety needs," Noem said. "For years, the level of actual funding drastically underestimates the true breadth of the challenges of Indian Country, made worse by the failed border policies of the Biden administration and exacerbated by the presence of drug cartel operations on South Dakota tribal reservations."
Single Audits, formerly known as OMB Circular A-133 audits, are required from all nonfederal entities — including tribes — that receive and spend $750,000 or more of federal financial assistance within a fiscal year, to make sure funds are being used effectively.
In two town hall meetings held on March 13, Noem alleged that Mexican drug cartels are operating on tribal lands in South Dakota and suggested tribal leaders may be benefiting from drug and sex trafficking.
In a statement released March 16, Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star suggested that the governor should "clean up her own backyard" and stop insinuating that all drug trafficking comes from the Sioux reservations."
Read more:
Montana high court says laws restricting voting are unconstitutional
Montana's Supreme Court this week struck down four bills including two which would have made it harder for Native Americans to participate in elections.
These included a bill that would have cut off same-day voter registration and another that would stop the paid collection and submission of absentee ballots by third parties, a method of voting common in remote rural areas and on tribal reservations.
The decision affirms a September 2022 district court decision ruling both laws as unconstitutional.
Plaintiffs Western Native Voice, Montana Native Vote, the Blackfeet Nation, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, the Fort Belknap Indian Community, and the Northern Cheyenne Tribe filed suit, Western Native Voice v. Jacobsen, against HB 176 and HB 530 in May 2021.
They were represented by the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Montana and Harvard Law School's Election Law Clinic.
"Today's decision is a resounding win for tribes in Montana who have only ever asked for a fair opportunity to exercise their fundamental right to vote," said NARF staff attorney Jacqueline De León. "Despite repeated attacks on their voting rights, tribes and Native voters in Montana stood strong, and today the Montana Supreme Court affirmed that the state's legislative actions were unconstitutional. Native voices deserve to be heard, and this decision helps ensure that happens."
Read more:
Man pleads guilty to killing eagles in Montana
A Washington state man has pleaded guilty to killing federally protected eagles on an Indian reservation and elsewhere in Montana and conspiring to sell their feathers and other parts in the underground market.
Eagles are protected under two federal laws, the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which bans the taking, buying, selling and transportation of eagles both living and dead, their feathers, eggs and nests.
Native Americans have for centuries used eagle parts and feathers for spiritual and cultural purposes or to mark important achievements. Knowing this, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the 1970s set up the National Eagle Repository, which collects and stores eagles and eagle parts.
Enrolled members of federally recognized tribes may apply for a lifetime religious use permit and order loose feathers, talons and other parts. Schools may also request eagle feathers to present to enrolled tribe members at graduation.
Read more:
Racism, 'Morbid Curiosity' Drove US Museums to Collect Indigenous Remains
In December 1900, John Wesley Powell received “the most unusual Christmas present of any person in the United States, if not in the world,” reported the Chicago Tribune.
The gift for this first director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology was a sealskin sack containing the mummified remains of an Alaska Native.
The sender was a government employee hired to hunt Indian “relics,” who said the remains had been difficult to acquire because “to come into the possession of a dead Indian is a great crime among the Indians.”
The report concluded that it was the only “Indian relic" of this kind at the Smithsonian and it was “beyond money value.”
As it turned out, it was not the museum’s only Alaskan mummy. In 1865, even before the U.S. purchased Alaska from Russia, Smithsonian naturalist William H. Dall was hired to accompany an expedition to study the potential for a telegraph route through Siberia to Europe. In his spare time, he looted graves in the Yukon and caves on several Aleutian Islands.
After the U.S. sealed the deal with Russia, the San Francisco-based Alaska Commercial Company won exclusive trading rights and established more than 90 trading posts in Alaska to meet the U.S. demand for ivory and furs.
It also instructed agents “to collect and preserve objects of interest in ethnology and natural history” and forward them to the Smithsonian. Ernest Henig looted 12 preserved bodies and a skull from a cave in the Aleutians in 1874. He donated two to California’s Academy of Science and sent the remainder to the Smithsonian.
More than 30 years after the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act meant to return those remains, a ProPublica investigation last year estimated that more than 110,000 Native American, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native ancestors remain in public collections across the U.S.
It is not known how many Indigenous remains are closeted in private or overseas collections.
“Museums collected massive numbers, perhaps even millions,” said anthropologist John Stephen “Chip” Colwell, who previously served as curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. “Out of the 100 remains we [at the Denver museum] returned, I think only about five or seven individuals were actually even studied.”
So, what sparked this 19th-century frenzy for collecting human remains?
Reconciling science, religion
From the moment they first encountered Indigenous Americans, European thinkers struggled to understand who they were, where they came from, and whether they could be “civilized.”
The Christian bible taught them that all humans descended from Adam and that God created Adam in his own image. So why, Europeans wondered, did Native Americans, Africans and Asians look different?
Some Europeans theorized that all humans were created white, but dietary or environmental differences caused some of them to turn “brown, yellow, red or black.”
Other Europeans refused to accept that they shared a common ancestor with people of color and theorized that God created the races separately before he created Adam.
The birth of scientific racism
Presumptions that compulsory education and Christianization would force Native Americans to abandon their traditional cultures and become “civilized” into mainstream European-American culture proved untrue. So 19th-century scientists turned to advancements in medicine to “prove” the inferiority of Indigenous peoples.
“That’s when you see scientists like Samuel Morton, who invented a pseudoscience trying to place peoples within these social hierarchies based on their biology, and they needed bones to solidify those racial hierarchies,” said Colwell, who is editor-in-chief of the online magazine SAPIENS and author of “Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture.”
Morton was a Philadelphia physician who collected hundreds of human skulls of all races, mostly Native American, that were forwarded to him by physicians on the frontier. In his 1839 book "Crania Americana," Morton classified human races based on skull measurements. Morton's conclusions were used to support racist ideologies about the inferiority of non-white humans.
“They are not only averse to the restraints of education, but for the most part incapable of a continued process of reasoning on abstract subjects,” he wrote of Native Americans. “The structure of [the Native] mind appears to be different from that of the white man, nor can the two harmonise in their social relations except on the most limited scale.”
Despite Morton’s legacy as an early figure in scientific racism — ideologies that generate pseudo-scientific racist beliefs — his work earned him a reputation at the time as “a jewel of American science” and influenced the field of anthropology and public policy for decades.
In 1868, for example, the U.S. Surgeon General turned his attention away from the Civil War to the so-called “Indian wars” and instructed field surgeons to collect Native American skulls and weapons and send them to the Army Medical Museum in Washington “to aid in the progress of anthropological science.”
“For museums, especially the early years of collecting, it was a form of trophy keeping, a competition between museums,” Colwell told VOA. “And some of it was a competition between national governments to accumulate big collections to demonstrate their global and imperial aspirations.”
All the rest, he said, were fragments of morbid curiosity.