Native America
Senate committee hears testimony in support of boarding school commission
The genocidal history of federal boarding school policies and the generational impact on Native American communities were presented to the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on Wednesday. Lawmakers in the committee are committed to moving a bill to the full Senate floor that would establish a truth and healing commission on the U.S. boarding […]
Five tribes sign historic agreement to preserve Bears Ears National Monument
Ink hit paper this weekend, and the five tribes that successfully won a battle with the federal government to create Bears Ears National Monument have it in writing that their interests must be part of land management plans going forward. President Joe Biden issued a proclamation last October that preserves more than 1.36 million acres […]
Two NM tribal leaders appointed to new Interior advisory panel
Tribal leaders from Arizona and across the country will have direct access to advising the U.S. Department of the Interior for the first time in history with the creation of a tribal advisory panel. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland this week launched the first-ever Secretary’s Tribal Advisory Committee. “Tribes deserve a seat at the […]
Feds award $7M for tribal language programs
Santo Domingo Pueblo and Diné College are part of the 45 tribes and tribal organizations that are receiving federal money to boost traditional language programs. The Living Language Grant Program is part of the Indian Affairs Office of Indian Economic Development and is designed for language revitalization programs for Indigenous communities. “For more than 150 […]
New Mexico’s education reform plan presented to tribal leaders
The plan is still a draft, but New Mexico leaders say it’s one step closer to meeting a judge’s order to reform public education across the state. But advocates want a greater balance than the back-and-forth, top-down approach they say goes in creating the education plan. And lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the Yazzie-Martinez lawsuit […]
Long-haul COVID: The ongoing impact of the pandemic in Indigenous communities
Since the onset of the global pandemic that began flourishing in March 2020, COVID-19 alone has become the third leading cause of death among Americans — falling just behind heart disease and cancer. But perhaps more striking is how the increasing and ongoing health disparities lived by Indigenous communities even now, two years into this […]
Analysis: What is sonic sovereignty? And why should Native Nations care?
Songs are historical documents, narrating the histories of our origins, geographies, relationships and more. Songs and language are so intimately tied and their survivance depends on each other. “Kiowa people sing Kiowa more than they speak Kiowa,” said Maxwell Yamane, a Japanese-American Ph.D candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland. The sentiment is also […]
Families for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives rally in Shiprock
SHIPROCK – Advocates and family walked from all four directions to Nizhoni Park last weekend to express how life has changed since losing a loved one. “This isn’t just about my aunt, this is for all those people that came today,” said Seraphine Warren, organizer of the Reunite our Missing event. “They don’t have anybody […]
‘We are still here’: Tribes reclaiming out-of-state ancestral homelands
Muscogee (Creek) Nation citizen Galen Cloud complained about traffic during the 10-hour drive from Okmulgee, Oklahoma, to his tribe’s homeland near Oxford, Alabama — before recalling how his ancestors had to walk that distance against their wills. “You think about it and you’re filled with madness, and then you just feel the pain and then […]
Light Up Navajo initiative helps Navajo with ‘life-changing’ access to the electrical grid
Melisha Beyal grew up on the Navajo Nation and always wanted to put a home on her family’s homesite in Klagetoh. It’s where her family is from and where she grew up — but it’s also in an area that doesn’t have access to electricity or running water. In fact, her mother moved away from […]
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon on the sounds of home in the Southwest
Raven Chacon makes noise. It comes from the found items he uses to make music at basement shows for five people, a sound he heard when his failure to make a homemade bass guitar as a teenager put his ears onto the vibration of experimental sound. He finds sound in deep quiet, discovered by […]
Congress explores creation of truth commission for U.S. Indian Boarding Schools
WASHINGTON — Survivors of a U.S. policy that forced Indigenous children to attend boarding schools where they were abused, died or went missing, detailed to members of a U.S. House Natural Resources panel during a Thursday hearing the need for Congress to establish a truth commission dedicated to unveiling the traumas Indigenous children experienced at […]