WASHINGTON — 

The 2024 elections in the U.S. highlighted the growing impact of Native American voters, especially in swing states such as Arizona. Home to 22 tribes, Native voters played a key role in that state’s results.

Unfounded claims of voter fraud and election irregularities four years ago triggered a surge of restrictive voting laws across the United States for this year’s vote, raising concerns about potential harassment and intimidation of voters and poll workers.

Exit polls showed a shift in Native American support toward Republican Donald Trump, driven by economic concerns and alignment with his party’s traditional values.

Biden apologizes for federal boarding school system

During his October visit to the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, President Joe Biden delivered a long-awaited official apology to Native Americans for the Indian boarding school system that severed the family, tribal and cultural ties of thousands of Indian children over multiple generations.

“I say this with all sincerity: This, to me, is one of the most consequential things I've ever had an opportunity to do in my whole career as president of the United States,” Biden said, calling it his “solemn responsibility.”

In a related story, the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in May launched the National Indian Boarding School Digital Archive, a public archive of information on boarding schools and students that includes documents, photographs and other ephemera.

Supreme Court: Feds must pay for tribal health care programs

In a landmark June decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the Indian Health Service (IHS) must fully reimburse tribes for the administrative costs of running their own health care programs.

Chief Justice John Roberts explained that if the federal government’s position had prevailed — opposing payment of administrative costs — it would have created a “systemic funding shortfall” for tribes that chose to manage their own health care programs, thus imposing “a penalty for pursuing self-determination.”

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued that the ruling could cost the government as much as $2 billion.

The 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act allows federally recognized tribes to contract with the Indian Health Service to operate their own health care programs, which IHS would otherwise manage. When a tribe opts for this arrangement, IHS provides the funds it would have used to run those programs.

Museums, institutions, under pressure to return Native remains

The Interior Department issued new regulations in 2024 to improve compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Passed in 1990, it calls on federally funded museums and other institutions to inventory and return to tribal communities all ancestral remains and funerary objects.

The new rules cut out a loophole that allowed institutions to hang onto “culturally unidentifiable” remains and give tribes a greater say in the process. Throughout the year, institutions have made some progress, but as ABC News reported in November, nearly 500 museums and federal agencies have so far failed to identify or make available for repatriation more than 90,000 remains and associated cultural objects.

South Dakota governor banned from nine Indian reservations

Since taking office in 2019, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem has had a tense relationship with the nine tribes in her state. Tensions escalated in January when Noem accused Mexican drug cartels of operating on reservations and then later suggested that tribal leaders were “personally benefiting” from that drug trade.

Oglala Lakota tribal president, Frank Star Comes Out, who had earlier declared a state of emergency over drug use and violence on the Pine Ridge Reservation, accused Noem of being politically motivated and in February became the first of nine tribes to ban her from the reservation.

Land Back movement sees some wins

The Land Back movement, a push for the return of lands lost to colonization, grew in momentum in 2024, and several tribes regained control of land or ancestral territories.

Among the successes, the Yurok Tribe of coastal California signed a memorandum of understanding to co-manage with the National Park Service 50 hectares (125 acres) of land they lost after the California gold rush in the mid-19th century.

TheLeech Lake Band of Ojibwe reclaimed more than 4760 hectares (11,000 acres) of ancestral land that the federal government seized from them in the 1940s.

And in the largest ever return of Indigenous land, the nonprofit Trust for Public Land returned 12,545 hectares (31,000 acres) to the Penobscot Tribe in Maine, with no easements or restrictions on its use.

Birth of white buffalo viewed as a blessing and a warning

A rare white buffalo calf was born June 4 in Yellowstone National Park's Lamar Valley, an event of profound cultural and spiritual significance for many Native American tribes.
According to Lakota tradition, White Buffalo Calf Woman appeared to the Lakota people during a time of great need, bringing them the sacred pipe and teachings of harmony, respect and gratitude for the Earth.

The pipe has been passed down for generations and is now held by Chief Arvol Looking Horse from the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, who explains the tradition in the video below:

Looking Horse presided over a ceremony in Yellowstone June 26, naming the calf Wakan Gli, (“Sacred Return”) and warning that the calf’s birth was both a fulfillment of prophecy and a warning for people to unite and protect the earth.

WASHINGTON — 

Each year, the Sitanka Wokiksuye, or Chief Big Foot Memorial Ride, remembers the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre with a 14-day journey on horseback from the Cheyenne River Reservation to the site of that violence on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation.

By the late 1880s, the Native American Lakota tribe was confined to reservations, their traditional ways of life forbidden, and the buffalo, critical to their survival, were decimated. Left to survive on inadequate U.S. government rations, the Lakota and many other tribes found hope in the Ghost Dance, a messianic movement that promised a return to their former way of life.

The U.S. Army interpreted the dance as a call to arms and sent the 7th Cavalry to suppress the dancing and arrest Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull, who the U.S. government believed was orchestrating rebellion.

Sitting Bull was shot dead, and his half-brother, Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitanka, dubbed Big Foot, led his followers to consult with the Oglala leadership on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

The Army intercepted them and forced them to camp at Wounded Knee village; the next day, while confiscating weapons, a shot rang out, triggering the Army to open fire. By the end of the day, Big Foot and about 300 Lakota, including unarmed women, and children, lay dead. The event was celebrated as a victory for the U.S. Army, and the government awarded Medals of Honor to 20 cavalry soldiers for their actions.

This year, the Big Foot riders and their supporters hoped that President Joe Biden might revoke those medals.

Oliver “O.J.” Semans has spent years lobbying U.S. administrations to “take back honor wrongly bestowed.” The Sicangu Lakota voting rights advocate from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota lost many ancestors in that violence and said, “If Biden’s going to do anything, the best day would be December 29th” as that is the anniversary of the massacre.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the Remove the Stain Act in 2019, calling on the Army to revoke those Medals of Honor. Despite some bipartisan support and backing from Native leaders and advocacy groups, the bill did not advance.

Administrative action

This July, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a review of medals of honor given for what he called the “engagement” at Wounded Knee to assess whether awardees violated the laws and military ethics of the era.

"It's never too late to do what's right," said an unnamed senior defense official quoted in the Pentagon press release that announced the decision. "And that's what is intended by the review that the secretary directed, which is to ensure that we go back and review each of these medals in a rigorous and individualized manner to understand the actions of the individual in the context of the overall engagement."

Austin directed a review panel of five members – three from the Department of Defense and two from the Interior Department -- to gather all relevant historical records and assess the actions of those soldiers based not on today’s standards but by those at the time.

"This is not a retrospective review," said another unnamed DoD official in the same Pentagon press release. "We're applying the standards at the time. And that's critical because we want to make sure that as these are reviewed and as a recommendation is made to the secretary and then to the president that we have applied the standards appropriately, while ensuring that we look at the context.”

The U.S. Army’s 1863 General Orders No. 100, also known as the “Lieber Code,” banned using excessive force, killing noncombatants, attacking during a ceasefire, and looting.

The Army held two sets of hearings on the matter in early 1891, interviewing officers and witnesses that included newspaper reporters, a surgeon and a Catholic priest.

“The Army was on the cusp of being a modern professional force, and so they at least made an effort to investigate allegations of crimes at Wounded Knee,” said Dwight S. Mears, author of “The Medal of Honor: The Evolution of America's Highest Military Decoration.”

In the end, the Army excused the cavalry’s actions as accidental and unintentional, and the U.S. Secretary of War recommended commendations.

“There was no political will to prosecute anybody, but they did collect a lot of evidence,” Mears said, “and if you sift through that with a critical eye, you can find a whole bunch of places where officers misrepresented themselves, which is a crime under oath.”

Three months after the massacre, the first Medal of Honor for Wounded Knee was awarded to an officer who, according to the medal citation “killed a hostile Indian at close quarters, and although entitled to retirement from service, remained to the close of the campaign.”

An award without guidelines

The U.S. Medal of Honor was created in 1863 to recognize acts of bravery, gallantry, and other distinguished actions in battle.

"But the Army didn't publish any standards for awarding it until 1889, so the commanding general of the Army just gave the medal out however he saw fit,” Mears explains.

In 1916, Congress directed the Army to review more than 2,600 medals and determine whether any had been issued “for any cause other than distinguished conduct by an officer or enlisted man in action involving actual conflict with an enemy.”

After an eight-month review, the Army struck more than 900 medals from the record. All of the Wounded Knee medals remained in place.

This year’s Wounded Knee review panel was given until October 15 to present its findings. By mid-November, Cheyenne River Sioux President Ryman LeBeau reported that the panel had voted three-to-two in favor of maintaining all medals awarded.

Semans believes that review was flawed from the start.

“Military historians weren’t used, and it was done over such a short period of time that evidence really couldn’t be put together,” he said.

Senator Warren and South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds asked the Interior and Defense departments to extend the review’s deadline to give stakeholders — including tribes, survivor descendants and historians a chance to weigh in.

"The devil is in the details,” Mears said. “If you don't know what actually happened at Wounded Knee, you might assume that every member of the 7th Cavalry, you know, just stood up and executed Lakota. And that is not what the record supports.”

To date, neither the Pentagon nor the White House has made any statement about the review panel’s findings.

“We have no additional updates to share at this time,” a Defense Department official told VOA.

Federal officials have joined with the state of Arizona to begin fulfilling a settlement agreement that was reached with the Hopi Tribe nearly three decades ago, marking what tribal officials described as a historic day.

Government attorneys filed condemnation documents on Friday to transfer dozens of square kilometers of state land into trust for the Hopi. The tribe will compensate the state nearly $4 million for more than 80 square kilometers of land near Winslow.

It could mark the first of more transfers of land into trust to help eliminate the checkerboard of ownership that characterizes much of the lands used by the tribe for ranching in northeastern Arizona.

A long time coming

Friday's filing was born out of the 1996 passage of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute Settlement Act, which ratified an agreement between the Hopi and federal government that set conditions for taking land into trust for the tribe.

The wrangling over land in northeastern Arizona has been bitter, pitting the Hopi and the Navajo Nation against one another for generations. The federal government failed in its attempt to have the tribes share land and after years of escalating conflict, Congress in 1974 divided the area and ordered tribal members to leave each other's reservations.

The resulting borders meant the Navajo Nation — the country's largest reservation at close to 70,000 square kilometers — surrounded the nearly 6,500-square-kilometer Hopi reservation.

Since the 1996 settlement, the Hopi Tribe has purchased private land and sought to take neighboring state lands into trust in hopes of consolidating property for the tribe's benefit.

A historic day

There have been many roadblocks along the way, including in 2018 when the tribe sought the support of local governments in northern Arizona to back a proposed transfer for land south of the busy Interstate 40 corridor. Those efforts were stymied by the inclusion of national forest tracts in the Flagstaff area.

Hopi Chairman Tim Nuvangyaoma said in a statement Friday that he was grateful for everyone who worked to make the condemnation filing a reality and that the timing for this historic moment was fitting.

"Within Hopi, it is our time of the soyal'ang ceremony — the start of the New Year and the revitalization of life," he said.

Gov. Katie Hobbs, who first visited the Hopi reservation in 2023, acknowledged that the tribe has been fighting for its rights for decades and that politicians of the past had refused to hear the voices of tribal communities.

"Every Arizonan should have an opportunity to thrive and a space to call home, and this agreement takes us one step closer to making those Arizona values a reality," she said Friday.

More transfers and economic opportunities

In November, the Navajo Nation signed a warranty deed to take into trust a parcel of land near Flagstaff as part of the federal government's outstanding obligations to support members of that tribe who were forcibly relocated as a result of the Navajo-Hopi dispute.

Navajo leaders are considering building a casino on the newly acquired land, saying such a project would provide significant economic benefits.

For the Hopi, bringing more land into trust also holds the promise of more economic opportunities. The state lands near Winslow that are part of the condemnation filing are interspersed with Hopi-owned lands and have long been leased to the tribe for ranching and agricultural purposes, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

Federal officials said Friday's filing is the first of an anticipated series of condemnation actions that ultimately would result in the transfer of more than 1440 square kilometers of state land into trust for the Hopi Tribe.

Washington — 

At least 3,104 Native American children died in boarding schools in the United States, taken from their families to be forcibly assimilated, The Washington Post reported on Sunday, with its estimate three times higher than that of the American government.

In these establishments, some of which were religious and which existed from the beginning of the 19th century to the 1970s, many children suffered physical, psychological or sexual violence, according to a recent government report which estimated that at least 973 students died there.

In late October, U.S. President Joe Biden apologized to Native American peoples, calling the atrocities "a sin that stains our souls."

According to The Washington Post, which conducted a year-long investigation, 3,104 students lost their lives in these schools between 1828 and 1970, in what the newspaper describes as "a dark chapter in American history that has long been ignored and largely covered up."

And the toll would actually be much higher according to historians, adds the newspaper.

The Washington Post says it has "determined that more than 800 of these students were buried in or near cemeteries at the schools where they attended, underscoring that, as in many cases, the children's bodies were never returned to their families or tribes."

According to documents seen by the daily, "The causes of death included infectious diseases, malnutrition and accidents."

Dozens of Native American students have died under suspicious circumstances, the article continues, "and in some cases, documents show indications of abuse or mistreatment that likely led to the children's deaths."

The boarding schools "were not schools" but "prison camps, work camps," Judi gaiashkibos, director of the Nebraska Commission on Native Americans and whose relatives were sent there, told the newspaper.

The Joe Biden administration has implemented a series of measures to support Native American nations and improve relations with the federal state.

In the United States, reservations now administered by Native Americans are predominantly poor, with high suicide and overdose rates.

In neighboring Canada, where the same practice of residential schools for young indigenous people existed, the country has also opened its eyes in recent years to this dark page of history.