Native Americans
- By Anita Powell
Biden memorializes painful past of Native Americans
U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday presided over his final White House Tribal Nations Summit by reaching into the nation’s dark past and establishing a national monument to honor the suffering of thousands of Native children and their families in federal boarding schools in the 19th and 20th centuries. VOA White House correspondent Anita Powell reports from Washington.
- By Anita Powell
Biden memorializes painful past of Native people
President Joe Biden on Monday presided over his final White House Tribal Nations Summit by reaching into the nation’s dark past and establishing a new national monument to honor the suffering of thousands of Native children and their families in federal boarding schools in the last century.
His proclamation starts a three-year clock to design a monument to be placed at the flagship Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in 1879, with the stated mission to “kill the Indian” to “save the Man.” Schools like this removed children from their families and forced them to speak English, wear non-native clothing and eschew tribal customs.
Earlier this year, Biden described the treatment of thousands of Native children at government boarding schools as “a blot” on the nation’s history.
"The federal government mandated — mandated — removal of children from their families and tribes, launching what's called the federal Indian boarding school era, over a 150-year span, 150 years from the early 1800s to 1970 — one of the most horrific chapters in American history,” he said earlier this year. “We should be ashamed.”
The most recent U.S. Census found that the population of those who consider themselves wholly or partly Native is upward of nearly 9 million. The U.S. Department of the Interior says it serves 1.9 million American Indian and Alaska Natives, many in sovereign lands.
That’s a shadow of the population that historians say thrived on the continent before European colonization. Native Americans were only granted universal U.S. citizenship in 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act.
Activists like Elveda Martinez of the Walker River Paiute Tribe say it’s remarkable how recent this history of dispossession and discrimination is.
"It's within our generation that Natives finally all had the right to vote,” she said. “So, that's still a big thing now. We always tell people, you know, it was our parents and people in that generation that fought for the right to vote."
As a group, Native residents have the highest poverty rate in the country, and their youth lag behind other demographics in education, according to a study by a bipartisan research group.
On Monday, Biden detailed his administration’s efforts to improve the livelihoods of descendants of the nation’s pre-colonial populations and to give communities more say, such as designating conservation areas. But he stressed that honoring the past is the way forward.“By making the Carlisle Indian School a national monument, we make clear what great nations do,” he said. “We don’t erase history. We acknowledge it and learn from it, so we never repeat it again.”
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, praised Biden’s work.
“President Biden has been the best president for Indian Country in my lifetime,” she said. “This is a president and an administration that truly sees Indigenous people and has worked tirelessly to address the issues in Indian Country that have long been underfunded or outright ignored.”
As a sign of her esteem, Haaland, who is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, draped Biden in a personalized parting gift: a black-and-white version of a blanket designed by Pueblo artist Pat Pruitt, who says the motif, which depicts thunder and lightning in the desert, is meant to evoke “the feeling of that calm before the storm that is filled with electricity and sound.”
But as one tribe made clear Monday, America’s Native people are not a monolith.
The Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians lashed out at the Biden administration for what the group says is a “lack of tribal consultation” over a wave of proposed off-reservation casinos, including a recent approval for Oregon’s first off-reservation casino.
“It is performative to celebrate an administration’s contributions to Indian Country when the actions tell a very different story,” Cow Creek Umpqua Tribal Chairman Carla Keene said in a statement sent to VOA on Monday. “We have been dismissed and ignored about policy that will devastate our social, cultural, and economic livelihood. There is time to do the right thing and put a stop to the pending decisions that will irreversibly harm Tribes across the Pacific Northwest and West Coast, which is a backwards step in American history, not forward.”
The principal chief of the large and powerful Cherokee nation — which includes about 450,000 people — issued a careful, diplomatic statement Monday advocating for the summit to continue under the next administration.
“I’m looking forward to attending the White House Tribal Nation’s summit this week,” Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. posted on Facebook. “Other than when the summit was not held (2017-2020), I’ve been attending since 2013. I hope it is a productive engagement and I hope it continues on in future years.”
President-elect Donald Trump indicated that he views Native issues as intertwined with energy generation, by naming North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as Interior secretary, while also serving as “White House energy czar.”
"We're going to do things with energy and with land interior that is going to be incredible,” he said, but did not elaborate.
As president, Trump angered Indigenous activists by lifting a ban on the Keystone XL pipeline that cuts through sovereign native lands on its path south from Canada to Texas.
Biden revoked Trump’s permit for the oil pipeline on the first day of his term.
Native American students found to miss school at higher rates
After missing 40 days of school last year, Tommy Betom, 10, is on track this year for much better attendance. The importance of showing up has been stressed repeatedly at school — and at home.
When he went to school last year, he often came home saying the teacher was picking on him and other kids were making fun of his clothes. But Tommy's grandmother Ethel Marie Betom, who became one of his caregivers after his parents split, said she told him to choose his friends carefully and to behave in class.
He needs to go to school for the sake of his future, she told him.
"I didn't have everything," said Betom, an enrolled member of the San Carlos Apache tribe. Tommy attends school on the tribe's reservation in southeastern Arizona. "You have everything. You have running water in the house, bathrooms and a running car."
A teacher and a truancy officer also reached out to Tommy's family to address his attendance. He was one of many. Across the San Carlos Unified School District, 76% of students were chronically absent during the 2022-2023 school year, meaning they missed 10% or more of the school year.
Years after COVID-19 disrupted American schools, nearly every state is still struggling with attendance. But attendance has been worse for Native American students — a disparity that existed before the pandemic and has since grown, according to data collected by The Associated Press.
Out of 34 states with data available for the 2022-2023 school year, half had absenteeism rates for Native American and Alaska Native students that were at least 9 percentage points higher than the state average.
Many schools serving Native students have been working to strengthen connections with families, who often struggle with higher rates of illness and poverty. Schools also must navigate distrust dating back to the U.S. government's campaign to break up Native American culture, language and identity by forcing children into abusive boarding schools.
History "may cause them to not see the investment in a public school education as a good use of their time," said Dallas Pettigrew, director of Oklahoma University's Center for Tribal Social Work and a member of the Cherokee Nation.
On-site health, trauma care
The San Carlos school system recently introduced care centers that partner with hospitals, dentists and food banks to provide services to students at multiple schools. The work is guided by cultural success coaches — school employees who help families address challenges that keep students from coming to school.
Nearly 100% of students in the district are Native and more than half of families have incomes below the federal poverty level. Many students come from homes that deal with alcoholism and drug abuse, Superintendent Deborah Dennison said.
Students miss school for reasons ranging from anxiety to unstable living conditions, said Jason Jones, a cultural success coach at San Carlos High School and an enrolled member of the San Carlos Apache tribe. Acknowledging their fears, grief and trauma helps him connect with students, he said.
"You feel better, you do better," Jones said. "That's our job here in the care center is to help the students feel better."
In the 2023-2024 school year, the chronic absenteeism rate in the district fell from 76% to 59% — an improvement Dennison attributes partly to efforts to address their communities' needs.
"All these connections with the community and the tribe are what's making a difference for us and making the school a system that fits them rather than something that has been forced upon them, like it has been for over a century of education in Indian Country," said Dennison, a member of the Navajo Nation.
In three states — Alaska, Nebraska and South Dakota — the majority of Native American and Alaska Native students were chronically absent. In some states, it has continued to worsen, even while improving slightly for other students, as in Arizona, where chronic absenteeism for Native students rose from 22% in 2018-2019 to 45% in 2022-2023.
AP's analysis does not include data on schools managed by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education, which are not run by traditional districts. Less than 10% of Native American students attend BIE schools.
Schools close on days of Native ceremonial gatherings
At Algodones Elementary School, which serves a handful of Native American pueblos along New Mexico's Upper Rio Grande, about two-thirds of students are chronically absent.
The communities were hit hard by COVID-19, with devastating impacts on elders. Since schools reopened, students have been slow to return. Excused absences for sick days are still piling up — in some cases, Principal Rosangela Montoya suspects, students are stressed about falling behind academically.
Staff and tribal liaisons have been analyzing every absence and emphasizing connections with parents. By 10 a.m., telephone calls go out to the homes of absent students. Next steps include in-person meetings with those students' parents.
"There's illness. There's trauma," Montoya said. "A lot of our grandparents are the ones raising the children so that the parents can be working."
About 95% of Algodones' students are Native American, and the school strives to affirm their identity. It doesn't open on four days set aside for Native American ceremonial gatherings, and students are excused for absences on other cultural days as designated by the nearby pueblos.
For Jennifer Tenorio, it makes a difference that the school offers classes in the family's native language of Keres. She speaks Keres at home but says that's not always enough to instill fluency.
Tenorio said her two oldest children, now in their 20s, were discouraged from speaking Keres when enrolled in the federal Head Start educational program — a system that now promotes native language preservation — and they struggled academically.
"It was sad to see with my own eyes," said Tenorio, a single parent and administrative assistant who has used the school's food bank. "In Algodones, I saw a big difference to where the teachers were really there for the students, and for all the kids, to help them learn."
Over a lunch of strawberry milk and enchiladas on a recent school day, her 8-year-old son Cameron Tenorio said he likes math and wants to be a policeman.
"He's inspired," Tenorio said. "He tells me every day what he learns."
Home visits
In Arizona, Rice Intermediate School Principal Nicholas Ferro said better communication with families, including Tommy Betom's, has helped improve attendance. Since many parents are without working phones, he said, that often means home visits.
Lillian Curtis said she has been impressed by Rice Intermediate's student activities on family night. Her granddaughter, Brylee Lupe, 10, missed 10 days of school by mid-October last year but had missed just two days by the same time this year.
"The kids always want to go — they are anxious to go to school now. And Brylee is much more excited," said Curtis, who takes care of her grandchildren.
Curtis said she tells Brylee that skipping school is not an option.
The district has made gains because it is changing the perception of school and what it can offer, said Dennison, the superintendent. Its efforts have helped not just with attendance but also morale, especially at the high school, she said.
"Education was a weapon for the U.S. government back in the past," she said. "We work to decolonize our school system."
This story is part of a collaboration on chronic absenteeism among Native American students between The Associated Press and ICT, a news outlet that covers Indigenous issues.
Long-sought court ruling restores Oregon tribe's hunting, fishing rights
Drumming made the floor vibrate and singing filled the conference room of the Chinook Winds Casino Resort in Lincoln City, on the Oregon coast, as hundreds in tribal regalia danced in a circle.
For the last 47 years, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians have held an annual powwow to celebrate regaining federal recognition. This month’s event, however, was especially significant: It came just two weeks after a federal court lifted restrictions on the tribe's rights to hunt, fish and gather — restrictions tribal leaders had opposed for decades.
“We're back to the way we were before,” Siletz Chairman Delores Pigsley said. “It feels really good.”
The Siletz is a confederation of over two dozen bands and tribes whose traditional homelands spanned western Oregon, as well as parts of northern California and southwestern Washington state. The federal government in the 1850s forced them onto a reservation on the Oregon coast, where they were confederated together as a single, federally recognized tribe despite their different backgrounds and languages.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, Congress revoked recognition of over 100 tribes, including the Siletz, under a policy known as “termination.” Affected tribes lost millions of acres of land as well as federal funding and services.
“The goal was to try and assimilate Native people, get them moved into cities,” said Matthew Campbell, deputy director of the Native American Rights Fund. “But also I think there was certainly a financial aspect to it. I think the United States was trying to see how it could limit its costs in terms of providing for tribal nations.”
Losing their lands and self-governance was painful, and the tribes fought for decades to regain federal recognition. In 1977, the Siletz became the second tribe to succeed, following the restoration of the Menominee Tribe in Wisconsin in 1973.
But to get a fraction of its land back — roughly 1,457 hectares of the 445,000-hectare reservation established for the tribe in 1855 — the Siletz tribe had to agree to a federal court order that restricted their hunting, fishing and gathering rights. It was only one of two tribes in the country, along with Oregon’s Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, compelled to do so to regain tribal land.
The settlement limited where tribal members could fish, hunt and gather for ceremonial and subsistence purposes, and it imposed caps on how many salmon, elk and deer could be harvested in a year. It was devastating, tribal chair Pigsley recalled: The tribe was forced to buy salmon for ceremonies because it couldn’t provide for itself, and people were arrested for hunting and fishing violations.
“Giving up those rights was a terrible thing,” Pigsley, who has led the tribe for 36 years, told The Associated Press earlier this year. “It was unfair at the time, and we’ve lived with it all these years.”
Decades later, Oregon and the U.S. came to recognize that the agreement subjecting the tribe to state hunting and fishing rules was biased, and they agreed to join the tribe in recommending to the court that the restrictions be lifted.
“The Governor of Oregon and Oregon’s congressional representatives have since acknowledged that the 1980 Agreement and Consent Decree were a product of their times and represented a biased and distorted position on tribal sovereignty, tribal traditions, and the Siletz Tribe’s ability and authority to manage and sustain wildlife populations it traditionally used for tribal ceremonial and subsistence purposes,” attorneys for the U.S., state and tribe wrote in a joint court filing.
Late last month, the tribe finally succeeded in having the court order vacated by a federal judge. And a separate agreement with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has given the tribe a greater role in regulating tribal hunting and fishing.
As Pigsley reflected on those who passed away before seeing the tribe regain its rights, she expressed hope about the next generation carrying on essential traditions.
“There’s a lot of youth out there that are learning tribal ways and culture,” she said. “It’s important today because we are trying to raise healthy families, meaning we need to get back to our natural foods.”
Among those celebrating and praying at the powwow was Tiffany Stuart, donning a basket cap her ancestors were known for weaving, and her 3-year-old daughter Kwestaani Chuski, whose name means “six butterflies” in the regional Athabaskan language from southwestern Oregon and northwestern California.
Given the restoration of rights, Stuart said, it was “very powerful for my kids to dance.”
“You dance for the people that can’t dance anymore,” she said.
Proposed tribal casino sparks tensions in California
The Koi Nation, a small Native American tribe with fewer than 100 members, is moving closer to building a $600 million Las Vegas-style casino resort in California’s Sonoma County, just an hour north of San Francisco.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs has released its final environmental impact statement for the proposed Shiloh Resort and Casino, marking a key step in the tribe's application to place 27 hectares of land into federal trust.
The environmental report analyzed the project's potential impacts on air and water quality, wildlife, traffic, and other factors. While most effects were deemed "less than significant," some were classified as "potentially significant." The public now has 30 days to review the findings and submit comments before the bureau makes a final decision.
The Shiloh project faces stiff opposition from California lawmakers, Governor Gavin Newsom and neighboring tribes. Newsom argued in an August letter to the Department of the Interior that the land in question lies outside the Koi Nation’s historical homeland — a key requirement under federal law for gaming approval.
Competing tribes, most notably the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, also oppose the project. They launched a high-profile media campaign earlier this month with full-page ads in major newspapers accusing the Interior Department of undermining tribal sovereignty.
At the heart of the controversy is the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, which sets the rules for tribal gaming and includes guidelines about a tribe’s historical connection to land. The casino must be located on land the federal government holds in trust for the tribe. The act also prohibited gaming on lands acquired after October 17, 1988, unless certain conditions are met.
One such exception applies to tribes with restored federal recognition. In December 2023, the Biden administration announced an updated final rule that made it easier for tribes to acquire land in trust. The rule now permits gaming on lands placed into trust as part of restoring territory to a landless tribe that has regained federal recognition.
To qualify for this exception, a tribe must demonstrate both a historical and contemporary connection to the land.
For the Koi Nation, the fight is deeply personal. In 1916, the federal government recognized the tribe under its former name, the Lower Lake Rancheria, and allocated 56 hectares of land in neighboring Lake County which were largely unfarmable. By 1918, most tribal members had relocated to Sonoma County.
In 1956, the federal government sold off 40 hectares of the Lake County land and transferred the remaining 16 hectares to the sole tribal member still residing there.
The Interior Department did not officially terminate the tribe; through clerical errors, it simply forgot about them. Decades later, the government reaffirmed that relationship.
“The Lower Lake Rancheria have been officially overlooked for many years by the Bureau of Indian Affairs even though their government-to-government relationship with the United States was never terminated,” then-assistant Indian affairs secretary Kevin Gover stated in his December 29, 2000 finding. “I am pleased to correct this egregious oversight.”
The Koi purchased the Shiloh land for $12.3 million in 2021 and applied to the government to place the land into trust. The tribe says that trails their ancestors used in trade pass directly through the site.
“The Koi Nation has been in this region for thousands of years and is fully within its rights to pursue this project,” said Sam Singer, a spokesperson for the tribe.
Singer attributes much of the opposition to fear of competition. Currently, more than 60 tribes operate 66 casinos across California. The Graton Rancheria operates a resort and casino about 17 kilometers south of the Shiloh property and is currently undergoing a $1 billion expansion.