Bodies of Indian boarding school students make their journey home
More than 130 years ago, three Oglala Lakota youths from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota traveled by train to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.
But James Cornman, Samuel Flying Horse (also known as Tasunke Kinyela) and Fannie Charging Shield, like dozens of other Carlisle students, contracted tuberculosis, a disease that thrived in crowded school dormitories. They were buried in the school cemetery until this week, when a delegation from Pine Ridge arrived to take them home.
The car carrying their remains returned to South Dakota, making stops at the Yankton and Rosebud reservations before traveling in a procession through Pine Ridge.
Amanda Takes War Bonnett-Beauvais, whose ancestor Thomas Marshall was also buried at Carlisle, was among those who gathered in the town of Martin to pay their respects.
“It's an event that's really emotionally sad, but at the same time, it's a really educational event because it brings forth what happened in the boarding school era,” she told VOA. “Even though it's a historical thing that had happened 130 years ago, the effects of what those kids, their families, endured are still ringing into our family infrastructures today.”
The children’s remains were taken to a reservation funeral home; tribe members and descendants will meet Monday to discuss where they will be buried.
Shoshone-Paiute tribal Chairman Brian Mason speaks from his office, March 15, 2024, in Owyhee, Nev., on the Duck Valley reservation which straddles the Nevada-Idaho border. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Did feds use, dispose of toxic chemicals on Nevada reservation?
The Associated Press this week revealed evidence that the federal government may have used component chemicals of the toxic herbicide Agent Orange (AO) as weed control on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Nevada.
The Shoshone-Paiute tribes who make their home at Duck Valley have long struggled with widespread illness and cancer, which they believe is linked to contamination of soil and water by pesticides and other chemical waste.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) managed the reservation until 1993. During the 1950s, BIA operated a maintenance shop on the reservation and improperly disposed of diesel and other oils by pumping them into the earth through a shallow injection well.
Tests on samples from the sump, soil and floor drains around the building revealed that BIA had stored a dangerous assortment of chemicals, including waste oil, arsenic, copper, lead, cadmium and AO components.
Although new wells were installed in 1992, the community was exposed to contaminated water for years, leading to numerous cancer deaths, particularly among former school staff and students.
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FILE - Climate change delivers drier conditions to the Pacific Northwest which requires different strategies for battling wildfires, like this one near Salem, Ore., Sept. 9, 2022.
Tribes lack resources to fight climate change along Pacific Northwest coastline
Over two dozen tribal nations along the Oregon and Washington coasts face climate challenges such as rising sea levels, ocean acidification, extreme heat, increased wildfire risk and declining mountain snowpack.
A recent report from the Tribal Coastal Resilience Portfolio of the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative shows that tribes have drawn up plans for combating extreme weather events, but they lack the funds, partnerships, technical assistance and personnel to put plans into action.
“Some of the challenges that we face on the coast are due to the magnitude of some of the projects that we need to undertake,” Quinault Indian Nation Natural Resources Technical Adviser Gary Morishima told the collaborative during one of a series of listening sessions conducted among more than a dozen Pacific Northwest tribes.
The Quinault tribe, for example, is working to relocate two villages vulnerable to climate change.
“That’s a multimillion-dollar, multiagency effort,” Morishima told the collaborative. “It’s very difficult to integrate our plans and priorities for village relocation with those of the agencies and constraints on available funding.”
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Crackdown on fake sober living homes push hundreds into Arizona streets
ProPublica and the Arizona Center for Investigative Journalism this week reported that a crackdown on fraudulent addiction facilities — so-called “sober living homes” — in the city of Phoenix has left hundreds of mostly Native American men and women homeless with no access to care.
As VOA reported in February 2023, fraudulent substance abuse providers targeted, lured and sometimes kidnapped Native Americans into sober homes across the city, billing Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) for services never rendered.
In October 2023, AHCCCS suspended the licenses of 12 sober living centers, adding to the list of more than 300 centers shut down by the state in 2023 because of allegations of Medicare fraud.
Thirty of the providers accused of fraud have been cleared to reopen and once again bill Medicaid for reimbursements.
“This is far from over, Navajo activist Reva Stewart told VOA Wednesday. “People are still getting recruited. People are still dying.
She shared video (above) that she said shows a group of recruiters coercing an intoxicated man into a transport van.
“Every morning, just on my way to work, I see like 20 to 25 Native people just hanging out by the Indian hospital,” she said.
Operators of fraudulent sober homes are known to frequent the Phoenix Indian Health Center and other locations, luring addicts and the homeless with promises of a warm bed and treatment.
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North Carolina Cherokees open state’s only marijuana dispensary
The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina launched its first ever adult recreational marijuana sales on September 7, taking advantage of tribal sovereignty in a state where growing, possessing, using or selling cannabis products is illegal.
More than 4,000 customers showed up at the Great Smoky Cannabis Company in the Qualla Boundary; some waited in line for hours to purchase from a menu of 350 products.
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