#Tribal Rights

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #28

July 19-26 2024

The EPA announced the award of $4.3 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grants. The grants support community-driven solutions to fight climate change, and accelerate America’s clean energy transition. The grants will go to 25 projects across 30 states, and one tribal community. When combined the projects will reduce greenhouse gas pollution by as much as 971 million metric tons of CO2, roughly the output of 5 million American homes over 25 years. Major projects include $396 million for Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection as it tries to curb greenhouse gas emissions from industrial production, and $500 million for transportation and freight decarbonization at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

The Biden-Harris Administration announced a plan to phase out the federal government's use of single use plastics. The plan calls for the federal government to stop using single use plastics in food service operations, events, and packaging by 2027, and from all federal operations by 2035. The US government is the single largest employer in the country and the world’s largest purchaser of goods and services. Its move away from plastics will redefine the global market.

The White House hosted a summit on super pollutants with the goals of better measuring them and dramatically reducing them. Roughly half of today's climate change is caused by so called super pollutants, methane, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and nitrous oxide (N2O). Public-private partnerships between NOAA and United Airlines, The State Department and NASA, and the non-profit Carbon Mapper Coalition will all help collect important data on these pollutants. While private firms announced with the White House plans that by early next year will reduce overall U.S. industrial emissions of nitrous oxide by over 50% from 2020 numbers. The summit also highlighted the EPA's new rule to reduce methane from oil and gas by 80%.

The EPA announced $325 million in grants for climate justice. The Community Change Grants Program, powered by President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act will ultimately bring $2 billion dollars to disadvantaged communities and help them combat climate change. Some of the projects funded in this first round of grant were: $20 million for Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association, which will help weatherize and energy efficiency upgrade homes for 35 tribes in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, $14 million to install onsite wastewater treatment systems throughout 17 Black Belt counties in Alabama, and $14 million to urban forestry, expanding tree canopy in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

The Department of Interior approved 3 new solar projects on public land. The 3 projects, two in Nevada and one in Arizona, once finished could generate enough to power 2 million homes. This comes on top of DoI already having beaten its goal of 25 gigawatts of clean energy projects by the end of 2025, in April 2024. This is all part of President Biden’s goal of creating a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035. 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pledged $667 million to global Pandemic Fund. The fund set up in 2022 seeks to support Pandemic prevention, and readiness in low income nations who can't do it on their own. At the G20 meeting Yellen pushed other nations of the 20 largest economies to double their pledges to the $2 billion dollar fund. Yellen highlighted the importance of the fund by saying "President Biden and I believe that a fully-resourced Pandemic Fund will enable us to better prevent, prepare for, and respond to pandemics – protecting Americans and people around the world from the devastating human and economic costs of infectious disease threats,"

The Departments of the Interior and Commerce today announced a $240 million investment in tribal fisheries in the Pacific Northwest. This is in line with an Executive Order President Biden signed in 2023 during the White House Tribal Nations Summit to mpower Tribal sovereignty and self-determination. An initial $54 million for hatchery maintenance and modernization will be made available for 27 tribes in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The rest will be invested in longer term fishery projects in the coming years.

The IRS announced that thanks to funding from President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, it'll be able to digitize much of its operations. This means tax payers will be able to retrieve all their tax related information from one source, including Wage & Income, Account, Record of Account, and Return transcripts, using on-line Individual Online Account.

The IRS also announced that New Jersey will be joining the direct file program in 2025. The direct file program ran as a pilot in 12 states in 2024, allowing tax-payers in those states to file simple tax returns using a free online filing tool directly with the IRS. In 2024 140,000 Americans were able to file this way, they collectively saved $5.6 million in tax preparation fees, claiming $90 million in returns. The average American spends $270 and 13 hours filing their taxes. More than a million people in New Jersey alone will qualify for direct file next year. Oregon opted to join last month. Republicans in Congress lead by Congressmen Adrian Smith of Nebraska and Chuck Edwards of North Carolina have put forward legislation to do away with direct file.

Bonus: American law enforcement arrested co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada. El Mayo co-founded the cartel in the 1980s along side Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. Since El Chapo's incarceration in the United States in 2019, El Mayo has been sole head of the Sinaloa Cartel. Authorities also arrested El Chapo's son, Joaquin Guzman Lopez. The Sinaloa Cartel has been a major player in the cross border drug trade, and has often used extreme violence to further their aims.

[olowan-waphiya]

https://ictnews.org/news/us-promises-240m-to-improve-fish-hatcheries-protect-tribal-rights

The U.S. government will invest $240 million in salmon and steelhead hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest to boost declining fish populations and support the treaty-protected fishing rights of Native American tribes, officials announced Thursday.

The departments of Commerce and the Interior said there will be an initial $54 million for hatchery maintenance and modernization made available to 27 tribes in the region, which includes Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska.

[notwiselybuttoowell]

California’s Yurok Tribe, which had 90% of its territory taken from it during the gold rush of the mid-1800s, will be getting a slice of its land back to serve as a new gateway to Redwood national and state parks visited by 1 million people a year.

The Yurok will be the first Native people to manage tribal land with the National Park Service under a historic memorandum of understanding signed on Tuesday by the tribe, Redwood national and state parks and the non-profit Save the Redwoods League.

The agreement “starts the process of changing the narrative about how, by whom and for whom we steward natural lands”, Sam Hodder, president and CEO of Save the Redwoods League, said in a statement.

The return of the 125 acres (50 hectares) of land – named ’O Rew in the Yurok language – more than a century after it was stolen from California’s largest tribe is proof of the “sheer will and perseverance of the Yurok people”, said Rosie Clayburn, the tribe’s cultural resources director. “We kind of don’t give up.”

For the tribe, redwoods are considered living beings and traditionally only fallen trees have been used to build their homes and canoes.

“As the original stewards of this land, we look forward to working together with the Redwood national and state parks to manage it,” Clayburn said. “This is work that we’ve always done, and continued to fight for, but I feel like the rest of world is catching up right now and starting to see that Native people know how to manage this land the best.”

The property is at the heart of the tribe’s ancestral land and was taken in the 1800s to exploit its old-growth redwoods and other natural resources, the tribe said. Save the Redwoods League bought the property in 2013 and began working with the tribe and others to restore it.

Much of the property was paved over by a lumber operation that worked there for 50 years and also buried Prairie Creek, where salmon would swim upstream from the Pacific to spawn.

Plans for ’O Rew include a traditional Yurok village of redwood plank houses and a sweat house. There also will be a new visitor and cultural center displaying scores of sacred artefacts from deerskins to baskets that have been returned to the tribe from university and museum collections, Clayburn said.

It will add more than a mile (1.6km) of new trails, including a new segment of the California Coastal Trail, with interpretive exhibits. The trails will connect to many of the existing trails inside the parks, including to popular old-growth redwood groves.

The tribe had already been restoring salmon habitat for three years on the property, building a meandering stream channel, two connected ponds and about 20 acres (8 hectares) of floodplain while dismantling a defunct mill site. Crews also planted more than 50,000 native plants, including grass-like slough sedge, black cottonwood and coast redwood trees.

Salmon were once abundant in rivers and streams running through these redwood forests, But dams, logging, development and drought – due in part to the climate crisis – have destroyed the waterways and threatened many of these species. Last year, recreational and commercial king salmon fishing seasons were closed along much of the west coast due to near-record low numbers of the iconic fish returning to their spawning grounds.

The tribe will take ownership in 2026 of the land near the tiny northern California community of Orick in Humboldt county after restoration of a local tributary, Prairie Creek, is complete under the deal.

A growing Land Back movement has been returning Indigenous homelands to the descendants of those who lived there for millennia before European settlers arrived. That has seen Native American tribes taking a greater role in restoring rivers and lands to how they were before they were expropriated.

Last week, a 2.2-acre (0.9-hectare) parking lot was returned to the Ohlone people where they established the first human settlement beside San Francisco Bay 5,700 years ago. In 2022, more than 500 acres (200 hectares) of redwood forest on the Lost Coast were returned the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, a group of 10 tribes.

The ’O Rew property represents just a tiny fraction of the more than 500,000 acres of the ancestral land of the Yurok, whose reservation straddles the lower 44 miles (70km) of the Klamath River. The Yurok tribe is also helping lead efforts in the largest dam removal project in US history along the California-Oregon border to restore the Klamath and boost the salmon population.

The Redwoods national park superintendent, Steve Mietz, praised the restoration of the area and its return to the tribe, saying it is “healing the land while healing the relationships among all the people who inhabit this magnificent forest”.

[personal-blog243]

https://p2a.co/uiasshy?p2asource=061024_BERMP_sms&utm_campaign=0624_bears_ears&utm_medium=sms&utm_source=attentive&externalId=uwMvF

Join us in calling on President Biden to approve the first-ever national monument management plan informed by Tribal Nations. The plan, known as Alternative E, supports Indigenous stewardship and responsible recreation in Bears Ears National Monument.

[nando161mando]

"Pottam, like most other youth from the region, had to abruptly drop out of school when their schools were converted into camps for the Salwa Judum, a state-backed anti-Maoist militia, over a decade ago."

[townpostin]

Tribal Leaders Vow to Expel Illegal Migrants from Santhal Pargana

Ex-CM Champai Soren Leads Rally Against Bangladeshi Influx Key Points: • Thousands gather despite heavy rain to protest illegal immigration • Leaders warn of threats to tribal land, culture, and identity • Call for united social movement to protect indigenous rights PAKUR – Former Jharkhand Chief Minister Champai Soren has pledged to remove illegal Bangladeshi immigrants from the Santhal…

[pluralzalpha]

I love Tanzania, but the Maasai have never been treated with respect. It's terrible to see a country founded on unity across tribal boundaries going down this route.

[wausaupilot]

2 Wisconsin tribes defend EPA rule on tribal water rights

“I want to see them stick to what we signed in our treaties,” Johnson said. “We look at our fish, our wildlife, our wild rice, plants, animals — everything that’s got to have that water to survive. Everybody needs water to survive."

By Danielle Kaeding | Wisconsin Public Radio Two Wisconsin tribes are defending a new rule issued by the Environmental Protection Agency that requires states to consider tribal treaty rights when setting water quality standards. The rule finalized in May aims to help protect water quality where tribes hold rights outside their reservations under treaties with the federal government. That…

[reasoningdaily]

https://x.com/VannMarilyn/status/1707533126702973306?t=Sj0McYkbpcg25tf6k9q08w&s=09

[headlinehorizon]

Vaping News: Environmental Victory for Tribe Rights in Midwest Ski Resort Expansion

Discover the latest news in the Midwest ski industry as the U.S. Forest Service's verdict thwarts the expansion plans of Lutsen Mountains ski resort. Environmental concerns and tribal rights take center stage in this unexpected development.

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #31

August 23-30 2024

The Department of Transportation announced $521 million to help increase the number of electric vehicle charging ports. They money will go to projects in 29 different states, DC, and 8 tribal governments. It'll help build over 9,200 EV charging ports. Since Biden took office publicly available EV chargers has doubled, there are now over 192,000 public EV chargers in the nation with about 1,000 new ones being added every week.

The Department of The Interior announced the first ever lease for off-shore wind power in Oregon. When fully developed the two sites in Southern Oregon will generate 3.1 gigawatts of clean, renewable energy, enough to power a million homes. Under the Biden-Harris administration first of their kind off-shore wind power projects have been approved and started in the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico coasts. In total 13 gigawatts of clean energy from offshore wind projects, enough to power nearly 5 million homes, has been approved.

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland finalized the protection of 28 million acres of public lands across Alaska.  In the last days of the Trump Administration protections for these lands were lifted. The Trump Interior Department did not consult with the Alaska natives who depend on these protected lands before lifting the protections. Deb Haaland the first Native American to serve as Secretary of the Interior declared "Tribal consultation must be treated as a requirement – not an option"

The Department of Health and Human Services announced $558 Million for improving maternal health. This is part of the Biden-Harris Administration's effort to address the maternal health crisis, which has been lead by Vice-President Harris. $440 million of the money will help expand a program of home visiting services for maternal, infant, and early childhood. $118 million, through the CDC, will go to 46 states, and six territories, over 5 years to help build the public health infrastructure to better identify and prevent pregnancy-related deaths.

It was announced that Maine will join the IRS' Direct File program for tax year 2025. Maine joins Oregon, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Connecticut, North Carolina, and Wisconsin along with the original 12 states. The Direct File program, made possible by President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, allows tax payers to file, for free, simple returns with the IRS. The 140,000 tax payers who used the pilot program in 2024 saved a collective $5.6 million in filing costs. Maine's Revenue Services plans to work with the ISR to allow tax payers to file their state taxes by just transferring the info from the ISR direct file.

[reasonsforhope]

"Cody Two Bears, a member of the Sioux tribe in North Dakota, founded Indigenized Energy, a native-led energy company with a unique mission — installing solar farms for tribal nations in the United States.

This initiative arises from the historical reliance of Native Americans on the U.S. government for power, a paradigm that is gradually shifting.

The spark for Two Bears' vision ignited during the Standing Rock protests in 2016, where he witnessed the arrest of a fellow protester during efforts to prevent the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on sacred tribal land.

Disturbed by the status quo, Two Bears decided to channel his activism into action and create tangible change.

His company, Indigenized Energy, addresses a critical issue faced by many reservations: poverty and lack of access to basic power.

Reservations are among the poorest communities in the country, and in some, like the Navajo Nation, many homes lack electricity.

Even in regions where the land has been exploited for coal and uranium, residents face obstacles to accessing power.

Renewable energy, specifically solar power, is a beacon of hope for tribes seeking to overcome these challenges.

Not only does it present an environmentally sustainable option, but it has become the most cost-effective form of energy globally, thanks in part to incentives like the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

Tribal nations can receive tax subsidies of up to 30% for solar and wind farms, along with grants for electrification, climate resiliency, and energy generation.

And Indigenized Energy is not focused solely on installing solar farms — it also emphasizes community empowerment through education and skill development.

In collaboration with organizations like Red Cloud Renewable, efforts are underway to train Indigenous tribal members for jobs in the renewable energy sector.

The program provides free training to individuals, with a focus on solar installation skills.

Graduates, ranging from late teens to late 50s, receive pre-apprenticeship certification, and the organization is planning to launch additional programs to support graduates with career services such as resume building and interview coaching...

The adoption of solar power by Native communities signifies progress toward sustainable development, cultural preservation, and economic self-determination, contributing to a more equitable and environmentally conscious future.

These initiatives are part of a broader movement toward "energy sovereignty," wherein tribes strive to have control over their own power sources.

This movement represents not only an economic opportunity and a source of jobs for these communities but also a means of reclaiming control over their land and resources, signifying a departure from historical exploitation and an embrace of sustainable practices deeply rooted in Indigenous cultures."

-via Good Good Good, December 10, 2023

[rusuga]

Visit, sign, and share this petition to support Native sovereignty and justice for indigenous people of America!

[decolonize-the-everything]

Have you heard of the American Indian Movement? Did you know natives had a movement/group in the 70's-80's dedicated to native liberation?

No? It's a part of history they don't teach you in school, but come close and look so I can show you.

Watch this, it's not long I promise. This is Russel Means, a prominent native activists and one of the leaders of AIM. AIM sought to help natives with things like tribal sovereignty, housing, healthcare, and food security.

Here he is testifying to the US government.

The transcript ^

A little excerpt of the end:

"The American Indian people’s right to self-determination is recognized and will be implemented through the following policies:

The American Indian individual shall have the right to choose his or her citizenship and the American Indian nations have the right to choose their level of citizenship and autonomy up to absolute independence;

The American Indian will have their just property rights restored which include rights of easement, access, hunting, fishing, prayer, and water;

The BIA will be abolished with the American Indian tribal members deciding the extent and nature of their governments, if any;

Negotiations will be undertaken to exchange otherwise unclaimed and un-owned federal property for any and all government obligations to the American Indian nations, and to fully -- and to hold fully liable those responsible for any and all damages which have resulted from the resource development on or near our reservation lands including the -- including damages done by careless and inexcusable disposal of uranium mill tailings and other mineral and toxic wastes.

I want to thank you, gentlemen, for inviting me here. It's been a high honor, especially since I'm the only one invited here today to testify that doesn't receive money from the federal government. Also, I want to make -- I was introduced as a former founder and leader of American Indian movement to the tribal chairwoman that you have here, a former associates for the American Indian Movement back in the days when we were gross militants and so I just wanted to let you in on that, that the American Indian Movement is a very proud continuing part of American Indian Society.

Thank you."

"The American Indian Movement remains based in Minneapolis with several branches nationwide. The organization prides itself on fighting for the rights of Native peoples outlined in treaties and helping to preserve indigenous traditions and spiritual practices. The organization also has fought for the interests of aboriginal peoples in Canada, Latin America and worldwide. “At the heart of AIM is deep spirituality and a belief in the connectedness of all Indian people,” the group states on its website."

[my-roman-empiree]

Roman grabbing what’s mine

[townpostin]

Adivasi Kisan Mazdoor Party Stages Protest in Chaibasa for Implementation of PESA Law

District Council members demand rightful share in DMFT funds and proper implementation of PESA law through a rally and sit-in protest. Key Points: – Tribal Party demands PESA law enforcement and rights for panchayat representatives. – Protesters seek inclusion in District Mineral Foundation Trust (DMFT) fund distribution. – Council members request the use of DMFT funds by village committees for…