Tribes sue administration over mega wind energy project
Two Native American tribes are suing the U.S. Interior Department and the Bureau of Land Management to halt construction of a $10 billion wind energy transmission line from New Mexico to California.
In their complaint, the Tohono O’odham Nation and the San Carlos Apache Tribe say the government failed to consult with them over the SunZia Southwest Transmission Project, which would run through properties of historic and cultural significance to several tribes.
“For more than a decade, the San Carlos Apache Tribe and others have been raising alarms about the need to protect the cultural resources in the San Pedro Valley from the impacts of the SunZia project,” Chairman Terry Rambler said in a news release on Wednesday.
With support from the nonprofit groups Archaeology Southwest and the Center for Biological Diversity, the tribes are calling for construction to stop until the Bureau of Land Management completes a “legally adequate inventory of historic properties and cultural resources that would be impacted by the project.”
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Delaine Spilsbury, a member of the Ely Shoshone tribe, gestures during an interview at her home on Nov. 12, 2023, near McGill, Nev. She has worked for years to have the Bahsahwahbee massacre site named as a national monument. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Nevada tribes call on feds to make massacre site a national monument
A coalition of three tribes in eastern Nevada wants the U.S. government to designate 100 square kilometers (40 square miles) as a national monument.
The Ely Shoshone, Duckwater Shoshone and the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation call the area Bahsahwahbee (Sacred Water Valley). Located in the bottom of Spring Valley near Great Basin National Park, it is the site of three massacres between 1850 and 1900 in which hundreds of their ancestors were killed by the U.S. Army and armed vigilantes.
“The people that were killed here were left here,” said Shoshone Delaine Spilsbury, who has lobbied for a Bahsahwahbee National Monument for decades. “Their spirits, their bodies, are in those trees. And so, we darn sure are going to protect those people.”
Nevada lawmakers and the state’s two U.S. senators, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, support the proposal. Masto’s office says she will soon introduce a bill in Congress to designate the monument. If successful, the site would pass from the Bureau of Land Management to the National Park Service, which works with tribes to preserve their places and histories.
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Read more Shoshone history of the site here:
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Harvard moves to ease burden on tribes seeking repatriation under NAGPRA
Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology says it will provide travel funds for tribal representatives to come to the museum for the physical repatriation of ancestors and associated funerary belongings. [[ https://peabody.harvard.edu/repatriation-visits ]]
“The funding will generally include transportation, hotel accommodations, and meals for direct round-trip travel and up to 3 nights in Cambridge [Massachusetts],” Peabody states on its website. It will also provide archival boxes and other containers but will not cover costs associated with ceremonies, special events or other services after items are repatriated.
“Some people have the mistaken impression that folks at Harvard are trying, by hook or by crook, to undermine this repatriation process. It’s not true,” said Joseph P. Gone, faculty director of the Harvard University Native American program. “No one at Harvard wants to hold on to these materials. Everyone wants to see these ancestors go back home where they belong.”
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A girl rides a horse near a highway accompanied by a dog on the Crow Indian Reservation in Crow Agency, Mont. on Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2020. Youth suicide among the state’s 12 federally recognized tribes is more than five times the statewide rate for the same age group.
Suicides up among Native youth in Montana
The CNN television news network this week focused on Native American suicide in the state of Montana, where youth suicide among the state’s 12 federally recognized tribes is more than five times the statewide rate for the same age group.
Native American youths are often exposed to more adverse childhood experiences, including poverty, substance abuse and family violence — part of a pattern of trauma rooted in historic policies of forced assimilation.
Suicide is preventable, but prevention programs available to Native American communities are chronically underfunded, and Indigenous experts say what few programs are available are not culturally relevant.
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Actor Lily Gladstone attends the 14th Governors Awards in Los Angeles, California, U.S., January 9, 2024. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni
Actress Lily Gladstone scores second ‘first’ in a month
January has been a very good month for Lily Gladstone, an actress who has Blackfeet and Nez Perce heritage. This week, she became the first Native American woman to be nominated for best actress at the Academy Awards for her role as Mollie Burkhart in Martin Scorsese’s epic “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
Earlier this month, she took home a Golden Globe award for the same performance.
“It’s time that Native characters based upon living, incredible women like Mollie Kyle be given the heart of these films,’ she told The New York Times. “‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ was an opportunity to restore a place onscreen for Native women that history has excluded us from.”
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