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A new study finds that Canadian coal mines contribute nearly all of the selenium found in Montana’s Lake Koocanusa.

Montana Public Radio’s Aaron Bolton has more.

For decades, coal mines along British Columbia’s Elk River have sent large amounts of selenium into Lake Koocanusa in northwest Montana.

Selenium is naturally occurring, but at high levels can harm fish reproduction.

Researchers wanted to know how much natural selenium came from the lake’s largest tributary, the Kootenai River.

Study author and U.S. Geological Survey Hydrologist Meryl Storb.

“Over the last decade, the Elk River is contributing 95% of the selenium into Koocanusa from those two sources.”

That’s striking because the Elk River accounts for a quarter of all waters flowing into Lake Koocanusa, but is contributing nearly all of the selenium.

Montana and British Columbia tribes are pushing U.S. and Canadian officials to shut the mines down.

The House Natural Resources Committee will host a roundtable titled “Strengthening Historic and Cultural Preservation.”

The roundtable is in commemoration of Native American Heritage Month.

The panel will discuss how Congress can better support and improve historic and cultural preservation.

Panelists include tribal historic preservation officers and tribal leaders.

Members of Congress expected to attend are House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member U.S. Rep Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), Indian and Insular Affairs Subcommittee Ranking Member U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM), and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Ranking Member U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM).

The roundtable will take place in person Wednesday in Washington, D.C. and will also be livestreamed.

Two small business owners rooted in western Alaska have spent countless hours preparing for a busy holiday season, as people gear up for gift-giving.

KNOM’s Ava White has more.

For artists with small businesses, the holiday season kicks off well before the temperature starts to change.

Shirley Hootch of Emmonak is a Yup’ik jeweler who specializes in handmade earrings made of caribou antler and walrus ivory.

She says she sources her materials through her family in Point Hope.

The first earrings she ever created, she says, remains one of her most popular sellers.

They resemble traditional Yup’ik masks.

She says she never makes more than five pairs of the same earrings, so each pair is truly unique.

“By supporting artists and jewelers and carvers, you get a one of a kind treasure.”

Nikki Corbett of Bethel is the owner of a popular qaspeq company called Sew Yup’ik.

Corbett says that when you support Alaska Native artists through your purchases, you have the chance to engage and connect with their culture.

“I don’t want people to be wearing the same one. I really tried to make each one individualized with its trimming and the accent hoods, or cowells.”

She says she makes sure to set good intentions because if she doesn’t, she risks passing negative energy to the piece she’s sewing, and that can transfer to the customer.

The state of Oregon recently announced its first Tribal Affairs Director.

Shana McConville Radford will serve in that position.

McConville Radford recently was the deputy executive director of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

She has more than 15 years of experience with tribal relations, policy, and intergovernmental affairs.

McConville Radford will help with communication and collaboration with the nine tribes in the state.

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Lake County says it will no longer provide law enforcement services on Northwest Montana’s Flathead Reservation.

Montana Public Radio’s Aaron Bolton reports the decision follows a recent court ruling.

Lake County commissioners say the state should pay the county for law enforcement services on tribal lands, but a judge ruled earlier this month that the state isn’t required to do so.

Lake County commissioners last week sent a letter to Gov. Greg Gianforte (R-MT) reiterating the county will no longer oversee felony cases on the reservation.

Commissioners issued a resolution to withdraw from the decades-old agreement with the state and Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe (CSKT) earlier this year.

State law required Gov. Gianforte to recognize the decision by Nov. 26.

The state will eventually take over law enforcement services.

County commissioners have long argued that the county doesn’t have the tax base to pay for law enforcement on tribal lands.

Lawmakers this year passed a law allocating $2.5 million annually to Lake County, but Gov. Gianforte vetoed the bill.

Gov. Gianforte’s office says it will “work with stakeholders to find the best path forward.”

CSKT declined to comment.

Courtesy CNN

A Montana woman, and member of the Gros Ventre Tribe, is one of CNN’s Top Ten Heroes for 2023.

Yellowstone Public Radio’s Orlinda Worthington shares her story.

Tescha Hawley lives near Harlem, just north of the Fort Belknap Reservation where she grew up.

It’s a remote part of northeast Montana, 40 miles south of the Canadian border.

Her journey to helping others began during a difficult time for her personally.

“Back in 2017, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I quickly realized that our worlds don’t communicate in the same way when it comes to healthcare,” Hawley said.

The lifesaving treatment she needed several times a month was 200 miles away.

“Transportation in our community is a huge barrier.”

After her recovery, she started the Day Eagle Hope Foundation to help alleviate barriers for others.

“There was a missing link in the services between our reservation and between our community and the major hospitals in the state of Montana and I decided to really look at patient navigation and to connect these two worlds together so we could better understand each other,” Hawley said.

Hawley began the foundation with her own money during COVID-19.

She now writes grants for her foundation, and has expanded services outside of healthcare.

“I received $250,000 over the next two years to deliver non processed, traditional, organic food, from our farmers and ranchers locally. That’s both Indian and non Indian farmers and ranchers.”

When Hawley first learned she’d been named a CNN Top Ten Hero, she tried to keep it quiet.

“I just wanted to traditionally, humbly go about my business, do the work that needs to be done. And it wasn’t until they explained to me that this could expose our work to other funders, donors, which will in turn help my community. So. You know, when I win, my whole community wins.”

The hero of the year will receive a cash prize.

Voting can be found online.

Elizabeth Golodoff Kudrin and her brother, Gregory Golodoff, photographed on Atka Island, sometime between 1946-1947, after they had begun to recover from the starvation they experienced during their stay in Japan, where they were housed as prisoners of war until 1945. (Courtesy: National Park Service, University Of Washington Press, And Ethel Ross Oliver)

Memorial services are planned for Monday in Anchorage, Alaska, for Gregory Golodoff.

As KNBA’s Rhonda McBride reports, he was the last surviving prisoner of war from Attu, a small Unungan village in the Aleutians.

He was 84.

When Golodoff was a young boy during World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army captured him, along with about 40 Unangax̂’, who were sent to Japan as prisoners of war.

Only half survived. The rest were never able to return home.

The federal government decided their island was no longer fit for habitation – and that it would be too costly to rebuild the community.

Instead, the government moved them to Atka, about 500 miles to the east.

Golodoff spent most of his life in Atka.

He was living in Anchorage with his wife, when he died on November 17.

Golodoff’s younger sister, Elizabeth Kudrin, died earlier this year in February.

The two said very little about their childhood experiences as prisoners of war, except that they suffered from constant starvation.

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When water solutions are discussed, many utility and business leaders are in the room. But at the annual One Water Summit recently held in Tucson, Ariz., some Indigenous youth got a chance to weigh in, too.

Emma VandenEinde reports for the Mountain West News Bureau.

It was the last session of the conference.

Some of the youth were not sure if anyone would show up. But after the session was over, several attendees in the room were in tears.

The youth are members of EcoTruths for Indigenous Youth, a team of students who are taught by elders about the earth and environmental policy.

Eight-year-old Kii’yaa’nii Ross is Diné, Yaqui, and Purepecha. She has one goal in mind.

“In golf courses, they’re wasting a lot of water, like gallons of gallons of water year after year. And they should use dirt instead because, like, come on we’re in the desert.”

Some youth expressed the need to balance housing development with water conservation.

Others want to control water runoff with Native plants. But the youth felt honored that they were listened to and hope more leaders will do the same, as their solutions will impact the rest of their lives. 

This story was supported by The Water Desk, an initiative from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.

Mazie Countryman outside the U.S. Capital Building during the White House Tribal Youth Forum this November. (Courtesy Mazie Countryman)

A group of Native youth advocates recently attended a Tribal Youth Forum in Washington, D.C.

Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann spoke with a young woman from the Wind River Reservation who went to the event.

Mazie Countryman is a sophomore at Idaho State University. In addition to being a full-time student, she’s part of the executive committee for the United National Indian Tribal Youth (UNITY) organization. She’s an enrolled member of the Northern Arapaho tribe.

Countryman, along with ten other Native youth leaders from the group, went to Washington D.C. earlier this month. Countryman spoke on a panel about boarding schools and the Indian Child Welfare Act.

“Most of our grandparents have gone through a residential school and have lived through that, and they just wanted us to give our perspective on how it has affected us through generations.”

The forum is in its third year. Its goal is to create a space for federal officials to hear directly from Native youth.

Countryman says when she graduates she wants to work as a pharmacist on a reservation while continuing to advocate for Native youth. 

Young Niizh (Gideon Starr), young Dora (Charlotte Cutler), and young Bezhig (Keris Hope Hill). (Photo: Steve Ackerman / PBS)

Little Bird is now streaming on PBS, and as Hannah Bissett from our flagship station KNBA tells us, it’s a Canadian series that examines self-discovery and the Sixties Scoop.

A new series is making waves in Canada with themes of discovering one’s identity, the Sixties Scoop, and Indigenous narrative sovereignty.

The series is called Little Bird and is streaming on Crave, a streaming platform, and has become one of its first drama series.

What makes this series stand out the most, beyond the material, are the writers and producers behind the series.

Jennifer Podemski is an Anishinaabe (First Nation) and Ashkenazi (Jewish) woman and worked on the show for several years.

She is a producer, actress, and director and began her work on Little Bird as early as 2015.

She has been telling stories from an Indigenous perspective throughout her career.

“It makes, I think, all the difference because the complexity that comes from authentic storytelling is so much more rich and layered and nuanced than what you get when other people tell our stories.”

The series focuses on an Indigenous woman who is taken in something called “the Sixties Scoop, ” a period in the 1950s to 1980s where young Indigenous children were stolen and adopted out to non-Indigenous families as a way to assimilate them.

“Hundreds of thousands of children were moved during the time. And although it does not represent every person’s story, we’ve done our best to create a story that does reflect the most collective experience possible.”

Podemski says that talking about these issues can highlight overlooked parts of history.

“We have a lot of history to retell. In order to catch up with our modern scenarios. And start to imagine ourselves into the future.”

Podemski is hopeful about the impact that stories like Little Bird will have on our future and reshaping traditionally exclusionary media like television to include Indigenous stories by Indigenous people.

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In honor of Native American Heritage Month, we’re celebrating Native arts and cultures.

Today, we’re featuring an exhibit in Santa Fe, N.M. exploring the art of parka making.

“To Keep Them Warm” at the Museum of International Folk Art explores the art of the Alaska Native parka.

“The parka is so much more than just its final product, you know, the final parka. It’s a whole outlook on the world.”

Melissa Shaginoff is co-curator of the exhibit.

“It’s about having relationship with the land and the animals and with each other. The spirit of Ghhúunayúkata, or to keep them warm, is really this gift of love, you know, and wanting to warm our family. But also to honor the land and the animals.”

The exhibit features 20 parkas from the mid-19^th century to more contemporary ones.

“This exhibit is really about the whole story of parka making and really about…how we relate to each other, from the hunter to the parka maker to the person who is gifted a parka. It’s really a whole story, and it’s so much more than just a garment. It really represents our whole culture and how everything is interrelated through kinship and through a deep respect and love for each other.”

The traditional garments were made for survival in harsh environments.

The collection here represents Yup’ik, Inupiaq, Unangan, Dena’ina, Koyukon, and St. Lawrence Island Yup’ik.

“So you have everything from you know caribou to bear guts to fish skin…to bird skins. We have we try to represent as much as animal material is used in Alaska as we could…So, as parka making continues to change and adjust just as our traditions are fluid and changes and adjusts, you see this transition from sinew into sort of modern uses of thread, and then contemporary parkas from neon shoes strings, to velveteen and beadwork as well.”

A rich selection of drawings, photographic portraits, dolls, and other art are shown through the space – all by Indigenous people.

Shaginoff says there’s a deep connection between people in the North and the Southwest.

“I think that, you know, as we continue to show who we are and tell our stories, we’re only going to strengthen the interconnectedness that, you know, our ancestors knew that we needed to survive.”

The exhibit is showing through April 2024 and is of no cost to Alaska Native and Pueblo people.

The National Endowment for the Humanities, which provides funding for humanities projects across the country, is working with the Interior Department on the agency’s Indian boarding school initiative.

Shelly Lowe (Diné), chair of NEH, says part of the work is to support projects that bring people together and tell stories in history not often taught in school.

“One of the things that we have been doing is supporting the work that they’ve been doing in the archives to pull out records of federal Indian boarding schools to digitize that material, and to eventually make that material available to the public so that we can have an understanding of this experience of this history in the United States. And that we can create materials to teach this history so that everybody knows that this happened, and the effects of the boarding schools, on tribes and communities in the United States.”

Lowe says next steps includes finding ways to support tribes and communities that have shared their stories.

“One of the ways that we want to do that is to help really support language revitalization, language programs for tribes and cultural revitalization, those two things that were really kind of stripped away from tribes and communities through the boarding school experience. And that’s just one example of some of the work that we want to continue moving forward.”

Lowe talked about the initiative during a recent visit to Alaska.

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Hundreds of water leaders gathered recently in Tucson, Ariz., for the One Water Summit.

The goal was to discuss ways to conserve water.

Emma VandenEinde of the Mountain West News Bureau talked with some Indigenous leaders about tackling it.

The Indigenous Resilience Center was created at the University of Arizona in 2021 to work with tribes on environmental solutions.

The center puts tribes first by giving them control over the water data it collects and only steps into a project when invited. 

They’ve worked on projects like setting up solar water systems that do not rely on electricity, or providing an off-grid water filtration system. 

Vicky Karanikola has been part of some projects.

She says their goal is to not just make a technology and walk away.

“If it’s not being used after we are gone or the communities don’t want it, then we need to go back to the drawing table and figure out what it is that was not working.”

The center received a $2 million grant this month to expand on the projects.

This story was supported by The Water Desk, an initiative from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.

Lynn Trujillo, Senior Counselor to the Secretary at the Department of the Interior, speaks with Gov. Joe Lombardo (R=NV) and Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-AZ) at a panel on the MMIP crisis at the Western Governors Association winter meeting in Teton Village, Wyo. (Photo: Hannah Habermann / Wyoming Public Media)

A panel discussed solutions to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Crisis at the recent Western Governors Association meeting in Jackson, Wyo.

Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann has more.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Native American women are murdered at a rate ten times higher than the national average.

How can state, federal, and tribal groups work together to address this crisis?

That’s what a panel at a conference in Jackson hoped to explore.

It was led by the governors of Nevada and Arizona.

Lynn Trujillo was one of the guest speakers and works for the Department of Interior.

She says one solution rises above the rest.

“I think most importantly, all of us agree, one of the most important factors is funding.”

Trujillo says more funding is needed for law enforcement and for resources for impacted families and communities.

She also highlighted the newly-released 212-page report from the Not Invisible Act Commission, which shares additional recommendations for solving the crisis.

Courtesy CCT F&W / Facebook

The Colville Confederated Tribes have received a unique gift from the Kalispel Tribe.

Steve Jackson reports.

The two tribes have been trading goods for many years.

The Colvilles would often send the Kalispels salmon and the Kailspels would return the favor with bison meat.

Now the Kalispels have upped their annual gift by sending a herd of 30 pure-bred bison.

Courtesy CCT F&W / Facebook

He says having a living herd on the reservation now is a big deal.

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The Oglala Sioux Tribe has announced a state of emergency due to increasing crime.

Now, tribal government alleges the federal government is not doing enough to support reservation safety.

South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s C.J. Keene has more.

The declaration was made by Oglala Sioux Tribal government representatives in Rapid City as a result of concerning crime trends over the last few years.

Among the most pressing issues are a murder rate over twice the national average and suicide rates among Native youth that’s well over two-and-a-half-times the average in the rest of the nation.

While the tribe has entered into a mutual aid agreement with regional law enforcement, tribal leaders say the federal government needs to do more.

OST President Frank Star Comes Out says the US government is in violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and the Black Hills Act of 1877.

“We don’t live in Indian County, we survive. This needs to change. It’s time to bring awareness to the world that the government has a responsibility to uphold – and that is treaty obligations.”

In multiple treaties dating as far back as 1825, the United States Government is named as a responsible entity in protecting the Oglala Sioux Tribe and its people from “bad men.”

Further, the 1877 Black Hills act formalized the existence of the Pine Ridge Reservation and the cede of the Black Hills to the American government.

That treaty was signed after the “sell or starve” rider cut off all rations to the Sioux people.

Those treaty interpretations led to a lawsuit last year that continues to move through the court system.

This May, a federal judge ruled the federal government does have a treaty obligation to fund tribal law enforcement.

OST Council member Anna Halverson reflected on changes she’d seen.

“I feel like a long time ago we maybe dealt with one homicide, maybe once a month or once a year, and now it’s every day. It’s getting to be very horrendous crimes that are being committed.”

Oglala representatives will send the proclamation to lawmakers in DC to agitate for additional support for reservations.

Additionally, President Star Comes Out says he hopes to speak directly with President Joe Biden soon on the matter.

Courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society Press

A new memoir called SURVIVAL FOOD shares tales from growing up on the Menominee Indian Reservation.

The author, Thomas Weso, was born in 1953. He passed away in July before the book was published.

WUWM’s Lina Tran has more.

Thomas Weso grew up in a time of economic transformation – when commodity goods were eaten alongside game from Wisconsin’s Northwoods. And then there was the rise of processed foods.

He often wrote about food. Here he is speaking in a 2021 interview with Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

“We should think about where food comes from. Because if we think where food comes from, we’ll take better care of the land around us.”

Weso’s wife, the writer Denise Low, says he was interested in writing about Indigenous people in the present.

“He had a very zen sense of like, “What’s here now?” and not “what were Indians like, or Indigenous people like, 100 years ago? Here we are now.”

Courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society Press

That’s why you’ll find all kinds of recipes in the new book, from tamale pie to turtle soup.

There’s instructions on how to forage milkweed pods, which Weso writes are tasty with butter. But he likes mixing them with canned tuna into boxed mac and cheese.

“He doesn’t just stick to Indigenous food. He tries to embrace the diner foods that he loved also. And to accept that there was an intermixture.”

Weso’s taste celebrated that unique mix, found only in Wisconsin, on the Menominee reservation.

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The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) has new leaders including president, Pechanga Tribal Chair Mark Macarro.

Rhonda LeValdo has more.

New NCAI president Mark Macarro was officially sworn in with other leadership positions Friday as the organization’s annual convention wrapped up in New Orleans.

Macarro says his priorities as president will include being more vocal in Washington D.C.

He also says there needs to be healing with state-recognized tribes, upset with this year’s membership amendment vote that would have stripped them of their voting rights and leadership positions at the organization. Those amendments failed.

“I want to get all of us used to coming to D.C. to reengage in a better way the mission of NCAI, which is being present in D.C. to Congress, the Administration, and the White House to advocate priority issues.”

Outgoing NCAI president Fawn Sharp reflected on some of her greatest contributions as NCAI president.

“Continuing to advance tribal sovereignty in the face of a myriad of challenges including, just three months after my election, a global pandemic and disproportionate funding that left us vulnerable. And we achieved equity with state, local government. I think that laid a foundation for our advancements in tax policy. I was the first tribal leader to receive diplomatic recognition to join the U.S. delegation to COP 26 and 27. The U.S. looked to us to lead a high-level conversation between the United States directly with Indigenous leaders from every continent.”

Sharp says she’ll continue to work to make an international imprint as she works to get tribal nations more visible outside of the United States by attending a meeting with Indigenous leaders in Dubai as Macarro starts his term as president.

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Two controversial amendments were voted down Thursday at the National Congress of American Indians annual convention.

Rhonda LeValdo has more.

As voting took place early in the day, attendees at NCAI had a wide range of opinions in both support and opposition on the amendments regarding membership.

The two, calling for only federally recognized tribes to be voting members and also for leadership roles, failed to pass.

Darrell Waldron Chief of the Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe was in opposition.

“I thought it was disgusting. The argument, pre-recognition we worked on the recognition applications back in the (19)70s creating it uh… and it was disgusting to hear what I heard today and not today, but this week, and to see a lack of education of the time span that had happened between, you know, first contact and then 200 and something years later, contact. And a lot of the work was done in the middle somewhere, you know, and I don’t believe the intentions were to come across as malice.” 

Christopher Tabbee, Vice Chairman of the Ute Indian Tribe, was among tribes in support of the passage of the amendment to limit NCAI’s eligibility criteria.

“I don’t think it’s fair for them to just vote on things that aren’t going to be affecting them and things that they vote on could hurt a tribe somewhere else, a federally recognized tribe, where they’re a state it doesn’t bother them. They’re not party to it. They can just say okay we’ll just go back to our state and deal with them, right. Funds through them or whatever, funnel through them. So I think that it’s important for one thing is important is that we’re not saying, I’m not saying that they’re not Indians or they’re not natives or they have no culture or they have none of that stuff but I’m just saying go get federally recognized and can you come back to the table.”

The next leaders of NCAI were also decided on, including the top position of president.

Mark Macarro, Pechanga Tribal Chairman, won that leadership role and will fill the place of outgoing NCAI President Fawn Sharp.

Marcarro, along with the next 1st vice president, secretary, and treasurer, will be sworn in on Friday as the convention wraps up in New Orleans.

PBS’ Native America had the last episode of its second season air this week.

For the Mountain West News Bureau, Dylan Simard reports the program received positive reception across the country.

Native America is a series that showcases the ways that native people are shaping modern American society – in science, sports, culture, and more.

Native Public Media has done some polling that shows the reaction in Colorado and Alaska has been extremely positive.

Loris Taylor is CEO of Native Public Media, a network of tribal public radio and television stations.

She says the show challenges stereotypes and gives Native Americans more representation in popular media.

“I think if you look at the ecosystem that we have, there’s a lot to share and Native Americans are just beginning to flex their storytelling arm – and it’s really wonderful to see.”

Taylor hopes that enthusiasm among the viewing public will lead to a third season.

Native Public Media and Koahnic Broadcast Corporation, which produces National Native News, worked on events and conducted Native radio station outreach for Native America Season 2.

This week, a small delegation from the Cherokee Nation attended a U.S. Senate committee hearing on the nomination of Sara Hill to serve as a federal judge in Oklahoma.

Hill is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and the tribe’s former attorney general.

The Cherokee Nation is supporting her nomination and advocating for it to move forward.

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Some of the controversial amendments proposed at the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) annual convention will be voted on Thursday.

One proposal seeks voting membership to be restricted to only federally recognized tribes and only citizens of federally recognized tribes to be eligible for an individual membership.

Another proposal is for board members and regional vice presidents to be citizens of federally recognized tribes.

As Rhonda LeValdo reports, while there’s much debate, not everyone wants to go on the record to share their viewpoints.

Currently, NCAI considers both state and federally recognized tribes as voting members of the organization.

Chief of the Shawnee Tribe Ben Barnes has concerns about the proposed amendment which eliminates the voting status to only federally recognized tribes, saying it diminishes the sovereignty of federally recognized tribes in NCAI.

“For the majority of these state recognized tribes that are members of NCAI, they have no Native ancestry, they’re not Native governments, so this creates problems for folks that are still seeking recognition and they’re legitimate, but NCAI has refused to deal with this issue and now its member tribes are left to take it up, and make sure that this passes.”

Several attendees at NCAI with various views declined to comment to National Native News about the proposal, but in an opinion piece in Native News Online, Lumbee Chairman John Lowery called the possible changes an “internal termination process that contradicts the founding principles of NCAI” and a slippery slope for the organization that could open up other tribes as targets including landless or non-treaty tribes.

NCAI is being held in Louisiana, a state with four federally recognized tribes and nearly a dozen state-recognized tribes.

Currently, NCAI has 145 tribal memberships and, of that number, 24 are state-recognized tribes.

For years, drought and development in the West have caused water shortages for tribes.

Now, a new institute aims to give tribes resources and training to advocate for their water rights.

The Mountain West New Bureau’s Kaleb Roedel reports.

It’s called the Tribal Water Institute.

Its goal is to help tribes navigate laws and policies, and recruit and train young water attorneys. 

The project was created by the Walton Family Foundation, a group working to protect rivers, and the Native American Rights Fund, a nonprofit law group in Colorado, where the institute will be based.

David Gover is a managing attorney and Pawnee and Choctaw.

He says helping tribes protect and assert water rights comes at a critical time.

“Climate change is impacting all of our communities, right? And there becomes more competition for that resource. And, of course, the states and industries are not waiting around, right? They’ll continue to find what they can and take what they can.”

He says the new institute will allow the fund to double its water staff to 14 members. 

The team will publish a semiannual report to educate tribes, policymakers, and attorneys about new and ongoing water rights cases and issues.

The U.S. Senate passed a bill late Wednesday night to avoid a government shutdown on Friday.

It has two expiration dates – one for funding programs for agriculture, energy, water, veterans, military construction, transportation, and housing through January 19.

The second has an expiration date of early February for the rest of the government.

The measure also extends the Special Diabetes Program for Indians through January 19 and the nation’s farm and food programs (WIC and SNAP) until September.

Congress is on break for Thanksgiving.

The bill was sent to the President for a signature.

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Broadband access is a top concern among many tribal citizens across the country.

The topic was addressed at the National Congress of American Indians annual convention Tuesday in New Orleans.

As Rhonda LeValdo reports, attendees also discussed technology, and data collected, managed, and applied responsibly in Indian Country.

Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance was a packed session.

The session talked about how tribes could model after the Gila River Indian Community.

The tribe, located in Arizona, started its own telecom company.

Governor Stephen Roe Lewis talked about how he was impressed by seeing his own people being taught about the telecom industry and its economic impact, which he says can be helpful for other Native nations.

“This is a moment that could be a digital mover across Indian Country and it’s important that tribes and tribal leaders take advantage of this moment.”

Former Federal Communications Commission Chief of the Office of Native Affairs and Policy Geoff Blackwell talked about the importance of Digital sovereignty for tribal nations.

“You are preparing yourself to assert your sovereignty in the cyber world that you are beginning to understand, to address, all these areas – network, governance, participation, authority.”

Blackwell was recently announced as NCAI chief of staff, and told the audience NCAI would provide an outlet for tribes to get connected with ways to navigate how to get started with digital sovereignty. And, federal funding may also be a way for tribes to improve access to broadband. 

More than $9 million has been approved for a project incorporating Native American management practices for oak habitat restoration in Oregon.

As KLCC’s Brian Bull reports, this includes cultural burns.

The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service awarded the money, which will go to the Oregon Agricultural Trust and its partners.

Ka-Voka Jackson is a program manager for the EcoStudies Institute, one of the partners.

She’s done controlled fire operations based on how Indigenous people did for ages, blending ancient practice with modern methods.

“Use of cultural fire, traditional fire, on the landscape, which usually entails people who are trained or have the wildfire qualifications. That usually entails fire trucks or water resources, the use of drip torches, other hand tools.”

The project also seeks to permanently protect designated oak savannas and woodlands, and give Native Americans access to them for cultural use and environmental stewardship. The priority area for this project are Lane and Linn Counties.

U.S. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (Cherokee/R-OK) made headlines after a heated confrontation with a witness during a hearing about unions Tuesday in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee.

The Senator from Oklahoma challenged Sean O’Brien, the president of Teamsters, to a fight during the hearing.

“(Mullin) Sir, this is a time, this is a place. You want to run your mouth. We can be two consenting adults, we can finish it here. (O’Brien) Okay, that’s fine, perfect. (Mullin) You want to do it now? (O’Brien) I’d love to do it right now. (Mullin) Well, stand your butt up then. (O’Brien) You stand your butt up. (Sanders) Oh, hold on, oh, stop it. (O’Brien) Is that your solution every problem? (Sanders) No, no, sit down. Sit down. You’re a United States Senator. (O’Brien) Act it. (Mullin) Okay. (Sanders) Sit down please. (Mullin) All right.”

The exchange happened after Sen. Mullin held up several pieces of paper reading critical Tweets made from O’Brien at the Senator.

The two threw insults at each other for several minutes as U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), chair of the committee, tried to calm the situation and then proceeded to move the hearing forward.

Sen. Mullin, an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and first Native American to serve in the Senate in nearly two decades, is a former MMA fighter and challenged O’Brien to a charity match next year.

In an interview on FOX News, Sen. Mullin defended his actions saying he’s a guy from Oklahoma and was responding to O’Brien.

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