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Photo: U.S. Rep Ruben Gallego introduced H.R. 663, which passed the U.S. Senate last week. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr) 

An Indian Affairs bill to prevent child abuse appears set to become law, after the U.S. Senate passed it earlier this week.

HR 663 was introduced in January 2023 by U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and has moved through the 118th Congress with bipartisan support.

The bill provides funding support for Native American tribes in treating and preventing child abuse.

It would reauthorize three programs at Indian Health Services and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, created by U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in the 1990s.

At a September hearing, Rep. Gallego spoke to the need for the bill’s passage.

“We’ll create a national Indian child resource and family services center to help tribes and urban Indian organizations with training and program development. We will develop new intergovernmental agreements between tribes and states to prevent, investigate, treat, and prosecute family violence. And we will encourage culturally-appropriate treatments and services, for children that have been impacted.”

In a press release, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who’s vice chair of the Indian Affairs Committee, said she applauds the Senate for passing the bill.

She said it is further progress towards ensuring safety for Native American children.

Two other bills that address missing and murdered Indigenous people, and healthcare disparities in Native communities, were also advanced for further consideration in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Cody Snell of Alabama-based Dixie Electric Cooperative connects a power line to a newly installed electric pole outside of the town of Kayenta, Ariz., in the Navajo Nation. (Courtesy Deenise Becenti)

Wednesday, we highlighted the challenge of living without electricity.

Today, you’ll hear from Navajo families who are getting power for the first time. The Mountain West News Bureau’s Kaleb Roedel has more on a life-changing program.

It’s the late morning and already nearing 90 degrees in the Navajo Nation … where many homes still don’t have electricity. And that makes life hard.

“We make a lot of grocery trips every day for, like, meat, frozen meat. And it’s really expensive like that.”

That’s Persephonie Blackwater.

She lives in this windswept desert about 20 miles outside of the small town of Kayenta.

A place where towering red mesas outnumber homes.

Like many here on the reservation, Blackwater relies on a generator, but she won’t have to buy another one this year.

That’s because a few hundred yards away, workers are using a crane-like truck with an attachment called an auger.

It looks like a giant corkscrew drilling into the earth.

A tall wooden power pole will be planted here to connect Blackwater to the grid.

Blackwater is getting electricity thanks to “Light Up Navajo”, a program started five years ago, but progress has been slow.

Development on remote desert land is expensive – and difficult – work.

Over the last five years, the program has powered nearly 850 households. And there’s still more than 13,000 that need power.

Ryan Begay, holding his 2-year-old daughter Ariana, stands inside his kitchen in Kayenta, Ariz., in the Navajo Nation. (Photo: Kaleb Roedel / Mountain West News Bureau)

Just down the road on the outskirts of Kayenta, Ryan Begay is starting to feel the benefits of having electricity, especially for his seven kids.

“They were excited even for like having popsicles in a freezer.”

Helen Nelson speaks at the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority’s office in Kayenta, Ariz., in the Navajo Nation. (Photo: Kaleb Roedel / Mountain West News Bureau)

Helen Nelson is an elder who lived most of her life without electricity.

But this summer, Nelson got power. She shares her story in the Navajo language.

Nelson says her life is a lot different now. Her son bought her a refrigerator. And at night, she can turn on a light if she has to use the bathroom.

Nelson says she was also excited to watch TV in her home for the first time. She stayed up past midnight – laughing and feeling happy.

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An American marten in the Apostle Islands. (Courtesy Erik Olson / Northland College)

The U.S. Interior Department has awarded the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission nearly $1 million for recovery efforts for American martens, an endangered mammal in Wisconsin.

Judith Ruiz-Branch reports.

Martens have been trapped for their fur for various purposes.

Jonathan Pauli is a professor of forest and wildlife ecology at UW-Madison.

He says silvicultural practices and logging within local national forests altered martens’ preferred habitats.

“This work is really trying to understand how do we manage habitat in a meaningful way, on these working landscapes, to increase marten habitat, and connectivity of these different subpopulations to ensure martens are here for the foreseeable future.”

Pauli says the grant money, from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s America The Beautiful Challenge, will bring together a diverse group of folks from the federal, state, tribal and academic levels over four years to create a forest management proposal, with recommended habitat improvements for marten recovery in Wisconsin.

The project will also include training for future biologists and ecologists.

In the 1930s, martens were considered regionally extinct.

A series of regional reintroduction efforts has spanned nearly 60 years.

Pauli says martens play important cultural, economic, and ecological roles including the ability, as predators, to keep rodent populations at bay that are important carriers of diseases such as Lyme’s Disease.

With varying degrees of chestnut brown furs, they have distinct golden throats and are the size of a cat, with semi-retractable claws that help them navigate through forests and snow.

“They actually live and hunt underneath that snowpack, that they can slink in and out from underneath the snow where they can hunt all the mice that are living underneath the snow, and then pop up out of the snow bank, and they have big feet like snowshoe hares, almost, where they can surf on top of the snow.”

For the first time in a century, martens were spotted this year on Lake Superior’s Madeline Island in northern Wisconsin.

Ecology experts say this gives them hope for a positive recovery trend for the rare mammal.

Courtesy Cherokee Nation

Legislation being signed by Cherokee Nation leaders in Oklahoma paves the way for construction of cell towers across the reservation.

According to the tribe, the Cherokee Connect Broadband Initiative includes 15 communication towers to provide affordable and reliable high-speed internet and cellular service to 16 unserved and underserved communities in the Cherokee Nation.

The tribe received a $34 million federal grant for its broadband efforts, and expects to invest another $11 million into the effort.

The legislation was approved by the Cherokee Nation council during its December meeting and will be signed into law Wednesday.

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Photo: Upper Columbia River at Northport. (Courtesy Washington State Department of Ecology / Flickr CC)

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has officially added the Upper Columbia River to its Superfund priority clean up list.

Steve Jackson reports.

U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva. (Photo: Gage Skidmore / Flickr CC)

An Arizona Democrat is calling on the White House to free Native American activist Leonard Peltier.

Peltier is serving two life sentences for an incident that took place nearly 50 years ago on the Pine Ridge Reservation that led to a shootout between American Indian Movement members and two FBI agents.

South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s Lee Strubinger has more.

U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) from Tucson views this moment at Peltier’s last chance at freedom.

He and 30 other congressional Democrats are calling on outgoing President Joe Biden to pardon Peltier.

“This effort is probably one of the few, if any left, in order to turn this around.”

In July of this year, the U.S. Parole Commission denied Peltier release.

He’s currently serving time at a federal prison in Florida.

In a letter to the parole commission, FBI director Christopher Wray said Peltier murdered the young agents in cold blood.

He urged the commission “in the strongest terms possible” to deny Peltier’s parole.

Wray says he will step down as FBI director when the Biden Administration ends in January.

Earlier this month, President Biden designated a national monument at the Carlisle Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania.

This follows a formal apology by Biden in October, on behalf of the U.S. Government, for the schools and policies that supported the boarding schools.

Peltier is seen as a symbol of racism and oppression against Native Americans by the U.S. Criminal System.

Some call him America’s longest serving political prisoner, who is also a boarding school survivor.

Rep. Grijalva says Peltier’s release could add to Biden’s legacy.

“The legacy is to turn around something that fundamentally was wrong. The legacy is to place the issues of injustice and rights of Indigenous people right at the center of the discussion. That continues to be the issue.”

(Courtesy Oneida Indian Nation)

The Oneida Nation in New York and Colgate University met Monday for the repatriation of the remains of 21 Oneida ancestors, which were removed from sites on tribal ancestral lands between the 1950s and 80s.

They were held in the university’s anthropology museum.

In 2022, more than 1,500 cultural items were transferred from the museum to the tribe, and the university formally apologized.

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Image: Map of the proposed mine site, submitted as part of Highland Copper’s air use permit application. (Courtesy Highland Copper Company Inc.)

A proposed copper mine in the Upper Peninsula is one step closer to getting $50 million in state funds.

IPR climate reporter Izzy Ross has the latest.

Funding for the project by the Canadian company Highland Copper was in front of the state House Appropriations Committee Wednesday.

Nichole Keway Biber (member of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians) spoke at the hearing.

“This is a dangerous project to these places. We can’t ignore that. There’s a lot of work to be done of restoration. We can invest in repair and clean up. So vote no on this $50 million.”

There’s a lot of controversy around the mine – and close to 300,000 signatures on a petition opposing it.

The underground mine would be built near Lake Superior and the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park.

Supporters, meanwhile, say it could boost flagging local economies and help meet demand for minerals necessary to build renewable energy technologies like windmills.

The House committee ultimately advanced the funding.

It still needs approval from a state Senate committee.

Artwork from “Nunaka”, an educational game for preschool age children. (Courtesy Chugachmiut)

A Sugt’stun language game is quickly gaining recognition since its release in July 2023.

KBBI’s Jamie Diep has more on the game’s development that teaches children around the world about Sugpiaq culture.

Developing educational technology skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s when Native nonprofit Chugachmiut, known in part for its education and health services to tribes on the Kenai Peninsula, began developing an app that teaches Sugt’stun language and school readiness skills for preschool age children.

The app named Nunaka, the Sugt’stun word for “my village”, came out last year and has been recognized for its advancements in educational technology and social impact.

Some notable awards include the Anthem Awards, EdTech Awards, GEE! Awards, and Serious Play Award.

Chugachmiut is a nonprofit that serves Eyak and Sugpiaq communities across the Kenai Peninsula, Prince William Sound, and the Copper River Delta, providing education, social services, health care, and more.

Chugachmiut Deputy Director Phyllis Wimberley says she came up with this idea more than a decade ago.

“I’ve been thinking about this game since 2012 and it was a matter of funding, getting the funding.”

She says she wanted a game that taught the language and skills to prepare children for school, like counting and fine motor skills.

The funding ended up coming from the federal government.

U.S. Department of Education and Chugachimiut began developing the game in 2021 with game development company FableVision.

The game takes place in a fictional Suqpiaq village.

Players control a customizable character and play minigames to complete tasks for their grandparents.

They create regalia, go fishing, and pick berries, all while learning Sugt’stun words.

Wimberley says game developers visited Nanwalek and Port Graham, two Sugpiaq villages at the mouth of Kachemak Bay.

“They met with our children, they met with the elders. They recorded elders speaking. It was really a wonderful experience for our game developers and for our elders and children as well.”

Children from the villages even got to test the game before its release.

Wimberley says it was a hit.

“The children would just, ‘ah’, I mean, you know, open their mouths. They were so thrilled with it, and they enjoyed playing it.”

Wimberley says she hopes to keep ramping up the nonprofit’s education department, with plans for a language symposium in February.

“Nunaka” is available for Apple and Android devices.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced a $1.3 billion investment to support local and regional food systems, building upon the Department’s previous investments in the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement and Local Food for School Programs.

This round of funding was announced in October, and will allow states, territories, and federally recognized Tribes to purchase wholesome, locally produced foods for distribution within their communities to emergency food providers, school, and child care centers.

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Photo: Mount Konocti in Lake Co., Calif. (tawnn)

A divided vote by county supervisors in Northern California recommend changing the name of the community of Kelseyville due to its connection to a 19th century settler who murdered, raped, and enslaved Wappo and Pomo peoples.

As Jacob Resneck reports, the decision bucks a countywide referendum held last month, where a majority wanted to keep the name.

Kelseyville was named for Andrew Kelsey, a 19th century settler from Kentucky who was killed in 1849 in an uprising by tribal members resentful of his ill-treatment of their people.

The following year, a bloody reprisal on Clear Lake by the U.S. calvary killed hundreds of people, in a dark chapter known as the Bloody Island Massacre.

A citizen-led movement has pushed to change the town’s name to Konocti, after the volcano that towers over the town 95 miles north of San Francisco.

But an advisory referendum on the November ballot found that more than 70% of voters were in favor of keeping the name.

Opposition to the name change came from business owners.

Mark Borghesani’s family has owned Kelseyville Lumber since the 1950s and said a change would be hasty.

“There was no discussion of what the name Konocti would be. There was no discussion of the impacts to businesses. There’s no discussion of the harm that’s being done to this town, to our community.”

Lake County’s Native American leaders say the lopsided result validates the racism in the community.

“I wanted it on record where this county stood with its Native population. It’s on record now. No running away from it.”

That’s Moke Simon, an elected member of the county board of supervisors and tribal chairman of the Middletown Rancheria of Pomo Indians of California.

He said the conversations sparked by this controversy has created a point of no return for the county reckoning with its past and present.

“This isn’t going away. Whether you think you win or you lose, one side or the other. Here the education has started. People have stood in this room and said, I did not know what this vote meant or who we are voting for. The education has started town of Kelseyville. Name will change before they put me back in the earth. I’ll guarantee that.”

But it’s not a done deal.

The California Advisory Committee on Geographic Names meets in February and will deliberate on the recommendation.

The final decision to change the name to Konocti – or something else entirely – rests with the U.S. Board of Geographic Names.

New Year’s Eve – like many holidays – is often celebrated with adult-themed parties and alcohol.

A Portland, Oreg. group is offering a free event that caters to those who’d rather ring in 2025 with their families, minus the booze.

As KLCC’s Brian Bull reports, it may be one of the oldest – if not the first – such pow-wows in the U.S.

The 37th Annual Sobriety Powwow will be at the Oregon Convention Center.

The Native American Rehabilitation Association of the Northwest (NARA) organized the event.

SandeBea Allman is NARA Northwest’s Chief Community Engagement Development Officer.

“To offer a clean and sober environment, for folks to celebrate.”

She says it all began in the 1980s with NARA’s Cultural Director Phillip Archambault, who wanted an event for those staying sober or just wanting to avoid the alcohol scene entirely.

“And also, some of the local Oregon and Washington tribes have created their own sobriety powwow, and Phillip took pride in that, that maybe they got the idea from NARA, so then they’d told us, ‘Hey, we want to do our own’, y’know, so we have our elders, we have our little ones, there’s things for everyone to enjoy.”

NARA Northwest’s Sobriety Powwow features kids’ activities in the afternoon, and goes through midnight, just into the New Year.

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Photo: The Alaska Native Heritage Center’s new exhibit on the impact of government and religious boarding schools is part of a series that will also look at the education of Native children before and after the boarding school era. (Rhonda McBride)

As it marked its 25th Anniversary, the Alaska Native Heritage Center underwent a major facelift at its Anchorage campus this year, which included new galleries and museum exhibits.

One of the latest projects looks at the history of Native boarding schools in Alaska. As KNBA’s Rhonda McBride tells us, it’s a work in progress.

The Native Boarding School exhibit is the first installment in a series that explores the history of Alaska Native education.

It is stark and simple, but damning.

“There is a power in naming the evil.”

This Alaska map is the work of Sonya Kelliher-Combs, an Iñupiat and Athabascan artist. Each red thread represents a child that was abused by clergy. (Photo: Rhonda McBride)

Benjamin Jacuk is the Alaska Native Heritage Center’s director of Indigenous Research.

Over the past few years, he has been looking at the role of churches in boarding school abuse.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is a map of Alaska, with tiny red threads hanging from various villages.

Each represents a child abused by Catholic clergy.

Combined, they make a curtain of red across the state.

“There’s actually a difference in just talking about these things, but actually seeing it right there in front of you.”

Next to the map is a plaque with the names of more than a hundred priests and missionaries, acknowledged by the church as having credible claims of sexual abuse against them.

The exhibit is called “Education in Alaska: Disruptions in our teachings” and will be completed sometime next year.

Future installments will look backwards, beyond the boarding school era, long before missionaries and Bureau of Indian affairs teachers took over the education of Native children.

“Really this history of us and our relationship with ourselves each other and our environment is something that is millennias old, tens of thousands of years old.”

Jacuk says project will bring the history of Native education in Alaska full circle with exhibits that showcase how Native languages and cultures are being taught in schools today.

“We also have generations of ancestors who still walk with us today, teaching us who we are.”

Jacuk says to fully understand how to heal centuries of historical trauma , you have to understand how boarding schools systematically attempted to destroy the identity of Native children.

(Courtesy Nashke Native Games / Facebook)

A Native-owned game company is making resources to help Ojibwe language learners of all ages.

Kathleen Shannon has more.

Tony Drews — whose Native name is “Chi-Noodin,” meaning Big Wind — was struggling to engage students in learning Ojibwe culture and language, until he brought a board game into class.

That day led him to launch Nashke Native Games in 2023, which sells games that help teach Ojibwe lessons.

One is a Native spin on a 1920s-era stock market game.

The new version is based on the fur trade and players deal in important traditional Ojibwe goods such as maple sugar, beads, and wild rice.

“The funny thing about the word ‘miigwech’ is that it means ‘thank you’ in our language. And the word comes out of the fur trade era. So it was just a natural catalyst to use this game to talk about culture and language. And it was an absolute hit.”

Drews says that teaching language through joy, music, crafts and games increases retention by about 95%.

He’s currently working with Lakota leaders to create versions of his games with Lakota language and culture.

In his own family, Drews’s great grandmother exclusively spoke Ojibwe, his grandmother was sent to boarding school and his father only knows a couple Ojibwe words.

He says Ojibwe culture is baked into the language.

The games are designed for Native language learners of any level, Drews says, and for their non-Native neighbors and community members, as well.

This story was produced with original reporting by Amy Felegy with Arts Midwest.

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President Joe Biden and members of his administration may be packing up their offices, but at this week’s Tribal Nations Summit, they also made some announcements of historic importance to Indian Country.

Matt Laslo reports from Washington.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) is, admittedly, biased, but she says there’s no debating that President Joe Biden “has been the best president for Indian Country in” her lifetime.

“And I felt the best way for us to acknowledge that was with a blanket. This is an eighth-generation blanket from a tribally owned business, and I’ve had it embroidered – it says, ‘Joe Biden, champion for Indian Country, 2021 to 2024.’”

President Biden just wishes he had the blanket at the White House last week.

“I could have used that blanket when I was lighting that Christmas tree — both of us were freezing. Thank you, Secretary Haaland.”

Biden used the summit to announce he’s taking further steps to enshrine his recent apology for America’s past Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.

First, he’s establishing Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School as a new national monument.

It was the nation’s first off-reservation federal Indian boarding school that housed some 7,800 children from more than 140 tribes.

“Stolen from their families, their tribes and their homelands. It was wrong. Making the Carlisle Indian School a national monument we make clear that what great nations do, we don’t erase history, we acknowledge it, we learn from it and remember it so we never repeat it again.”

Boarding schools like Carlisle were meant to erase the heritage of Native Americans and Alaska Natives, which is why Biden also announced he’s instituting a new 10-year plan to revive Native languages.

“It’s a vision that works with tribes to support teachers, schools, communities, organizations, in order to save Native language from disappearing. This matters. It’s part of our heritage. It’s part of who we are as a nation. It’s how we got to be who we are.”

Biden is hoping Indian Country is remembered as a part of his legacy.

“This is my final White House Tribal Nations Summit as your president. It’s been an overwhelming honor, I mean this sincerely, an honor of a lifetime, to usher in a new era of tribal sovereignty and self-determination. A new era grounded in dignity and respect that I’ve seen and experienced in many ways.”

(Courtesy North Dakota Historical Society)

The North Dakota State Historical Society obtained a collection of original lithographs depicting life among Indigenous peoples of the Dakotas.

What was once hidden in a San Francisco arthouse are now part of the group’s permanent collection.

South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s C.J. Keene reports.

In 1832, Swiss artist Karl Bodmer and German Prince Maximillian embarked on a journey throughout the American Interior West.

One of the results of that expedition were the paintings of dozens of lithographs depicting Indigenous life in the region before widespread colonization of the plains.

Less than five years later, a smallpox epidemic would devastate the local Indigenous population depicted in these paintings.

Kara Haff is the public information officer for the North Dakota State Historical Society.

“The expedition stayed at Fort Clark, they were down in South Dakota, up near Fort Union. Along the way, a number of significant portraits of different Native American chiefs were a part of it, but the daily life too were documented through Bodmer’s artwork.”

Haff says it’s a rare collection of originals to see, let alone acquire for a state historical society.

“Bodmer was working on turning the sketches, paintings, and drawings to transfer those artworks onto plates to be stamped or lithographed. They don’t come up to auction very often, or come even in a complete set very often.”

The 1830s originals will be placed into rotation at the North Dakota Historical Society soon.

The collection, featuring over two dozen total works, was acquired via a donation from Sam McQuade Jr., with an earmark for fine art purchases.

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