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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.
Casey Sixkiller, regional administrator for EPA Region 10, says both the Spokane and Colville Confederated Tribes have been supportive of adding the Superfund designation.
“Tribal members are hunting and fishing and they are consuming those resources and so the obviously have a vested interest in ensuring that the food their tribal members are consuming is not unhealthy for them.”
The Colville Tribes have been engaged in litigation for over 20 years with the Canadian company Teck to try to get them to take responsibility for the clean up of the area.
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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