Good Morning, NUNAverse,
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has withdrawn a controversial federal rule that threatened to kill more than 17,000 regulations and undercut health care for more than 20,000 American Indians in San Bernardino and Riverside counties. In its notice published in the Federal Register on May 27, HHS stated that the rule — called SUNSET for Securing Updated and Necessary Statutory Evaluations Timely — was “expansive in scope, faced considerable opposition from stakeholders, and lacked a public health or welfare rationale for expediting rulemaking.” The SUNSET rule was introduced by the Trump administration the day before Joe Biden was inaugurated. It tasked HHS and its sub-agencies to review, within five years, 17,200 of its 18,000 regulations. If the regulations were not reviewed in that time frame, they would automatically expire. Critics said the rule would have affected everything from food and drug safety to manufacturing and medical care for millions of Americans. And the impact on health care in Indian Country could have been even more devastating.
In the largest land-back agreement in Minnesota and one of the largest-ever in Indian Country, the Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe today restored more than 28,000 acres of land within its reservation boundaries back to tribal ownership. The purchase of the 28,089 acres in northern Minnesota from The Conservation Fund will restore lands that were sold by the federal government to non-Natives as “surplus” under the Allotment Act, which attempted to break up tribal reservations. Cathy Chavers, chairwoman of The Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, described the Bois Forte reservation as a “checkerboard” that sits roughly 45 miles south of the Canadian border. The “checkerboard” reservation is divided into three sectors: Nett Lake, Vermilion, and Deer Creek. The 28,000 acres will be restored in the Nett Lake and Deer Creek sections of the reservation. The Bois Forte Band plans to directly manage the restored lands under a forest management plan that emphasizes conservation and environmental protection, balanced with economic and cultural benefits to the Band and its members, according to a statement.
Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced the launch of the “Next Legends” Youth E-cigarette Prevention Campaign as part of the agency’s ongoing efforts to protect youth from the dangers of tobacco use. The campaign will educate American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) youth, ages 12-17, about the harms of vaping through unique branding and tailored messaging created to inspire a new generation to live Native strong and vape-free. There are approximately 400,000 Native teens in the U.S., and more than half of them are at-risk of using tobacco products, including e-cigarettes. Studies show that Native youth are more susceptible to e-cigarette use than their non-Native peers, and they demonstrate disproportionately high experimentation and current use of e-cigarettes.
The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) says it will remove the word “chief” from job titles after the Native community “expressed concerns” over the word. Spokesperson Gentle Blythe told the San Francisco Chronicle that the decision was made on May 25. The district, which employs 10,000 people, has not yet determined what to call the high-raking officials. “While there are many opinions on the matter, our leadership team agreed that, given that Native members of our community have expressed concerns over the use of the title, we are no longer going to use it,” Blythe said. “By changing how we refer to our division heads we are in no way diminishing the indispensable contributions of our district central service leaders,” the spokesperson added. According to SFUSD’s official website, the district employs 13 officials who have the word “chief” in their titles.
Keep reading for a full news update.
Health:
Biden Administration Repeals Law That Could Have Undercut American Indian Health Care
Daily Bulletin, Joe Nelson, June 7
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has withdrawn a controversial federal rule that threatened to kill more than 17,000 regulations and undercut health care for more than 20,000 American Indians in San Bernardino and Riverside counties. In its notice published in the Federal Register on May 27, HHS stated that the rule — called SUNSET for Securing Updated and Necessary Statutory Evaluations Timely — was “expansive in scope, faced considerable opposition from stakeholders, and lacked a public health or welfare rationale for expediting rulemaking.” The SUNSET rule was introduced by the Trump administration the day before Joe Biden was inaugurated. It tasked HHS and its sub-agencies to review, within five years, 17,200 of its 18,000 regulations. If the regulations were not reviewed in that time frame, they would automatically expire. Critics said the rule would have affected everything from food and drug safety to manufacturing and medical care for millions of Americans. And the impact on health care in Indian Country could have been even more devastating.
FDA Launches Campaign Aimed at Preventing E-Cigarette Use Among American Indian/Alaska Native Youth
FDA News Release, June 8
Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced the launch of the “Next Legends” Youth E-cigarette Prevention Campaign as part of the agency’s ongoing efforts to protect youth from the dangers of tobacco use. The campaign will educate American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) youth, ages 12-17, about the harms of vaping through unique branding and tailored messaging created to inspire a new generation to live Native strong and vape-free. There are approximately 400,000 Native teens in the U.S., and more than half of them are at-risk of using tobacco products, including e-cigarettes. Studies show that Native youth are more susceptible to e-cigarette use than their non-Native peers, and they demonstrate disproportionately high experimentation and current use of e-cigarettes.
Native Mascots:
Connecticut School Board Sued Over Renaming of Native Mascots
Bloomberg Law, Peter Hayes, June 7
A Connecticut school board’s plan to discontinue the use of the names Chieftains and Warriors by athletic teams at its public high schools was unlawful, according to a lawsuit filed in state court. Plaintiffs Scott Zweig and Mary McGowan allege that the West Hartford Board of Education failed to follow its own procedural rules, including providing public notice and obtaining input from residents, before voting to change the mascot names at Hall High School and Conard High School, according to the complaint filed Monday in Connecticut Superior Court. The complaint alleges the board violated the plaintiffs’ due process rights “by proposing a vote on the team names during a nationwide surge in the Omicron COVID-19 variant and providing only 56 days for interested members of the general public to provide public comment, when there was no urgent legally recognized need to proceed with the vote under such conditions.” The board passed the renaming motions for the two schools on February 1, eight months after the state legislature passed a measure making municipalities with schools that use Native team names or mascots ineligible for grants from a fund whose revenue derives from casino gaming. The principals at Hall and Conard are scheduled to present new team names to the board for approval on June 7.
CA School District to Remove ‘Chief’ from Job Titles After Native Objections
CBN News, Andrea Morris, June 6
The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) says it will remove the word “chief” from job titles after the Native community “expressed concerns” over the word. Spokesperson Gentle Blythe told the San Francisco Chronicle that the decision was made on May 25. The district, which employs 10,000 people, has not yet determined what to call the high-raking officials.
“While there are many opinions on the matter, our leadership team agreed that, given that Native members of our community have expressed concerns over the use of the title, we are no longer going to use it,” Blythe said. “By changing how we refer to our division heads we are in no way diminishing the indispensable contributions of our district central service leaders,” the spokesperson added. According to SFUSD’s official website, the district employs 13 officials who have the word “chief” in their titles.
Activists Take Aim At Florida Schools With Native Mascots, Logos
Tampa Bay News, Jeffrey S. Solochek, June 7
Advocacy groups have clamored to remove Native mascots and logos from several Hillsborough County (Florida) schools for the past three years. They made some early headway with some elementary and middle schools. But their effort to effect change at East Bay and Chamberlain high schools stalled out. Now activists plan to take their message to the streets. They intend to protest outside the School Board’s June 21 meeting in downtown Tampa, Creative Loafing reports. “It’s time to be actually respectful of the Indigenous peoples,” the Florida Indigenous Alliance wrote in a statement on its Facebook page.
W. Hartford Teams Get New Non-Native Mascots
AP News, June 8
A Connecticut town’s board of education has changed the mascots of two high schools despite a lawsuit filed in an attempt to keep the schools’ former Native nicknames. West Hartford’s Board of Education voted Tuesday night to change the nickname of Conard High School’s athletic teams from the Chieftains to the Red Wolves and Hall High School’s teams from the Warriors to the Titans. The vote came despite a lawsuit filed Monday by attorney Scott Zweig, a town resident, who argues that the board violated residents’ due process rights when it voted in February to end the use of the Native monikers. The state last year enacted a law that requires municipalities whose athletic teams use Native names or mascots to receive written support from a state or federally recognized tribe in Connecticut or risk losing state grants derived from revenue at the state’s two tribal casinos, The Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods Resort Casino.
Other:
Bois Forte Band Gets 28,000 Acres Of Land Back In Northern Minnesota
Native News Online, Jenna Kunze, June 8
In the largest land-back agreement in Minnesota and one of the largest-ever in Indian Country, the Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe today restored more than 28,000 acres of land within its reservation boundaries back to tribal ownership. The purchase of the 28,089 acres in northern Minnesota from The Conservation Fund will restore lands that were sold by the federal government to non-Natives as “surplus” under the Allotment Act, which attempted to break up tribal reservations. Cathy Chavers, chairwoman of The Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, described the Bois Forte reservation as a “checkerboard” that sits roughly 45 miles south of the Canadian border. The “checkerboard” reservation is divided into three sectors: Nett Lake, Vermilion, and Deer Creek. The 28,000 acres will be restored in the Nett Lake and Deer Creek sections of the reservation. The Bois Forte Band plans to directly manage the restored lands under a forest management plan that emphasizes conservation and environmental protection, balanced with economic and cultural benefits to the Band and its members, according to a statement.
Cherokee Nation Signs Historic Self-Governance Agreement With The U.S. DOT
Native News Online, Levi Rickert, June 7
The Cherokee Nation signed an historic self-governance agreement with the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) on Tuesday. The pact allows one of Indian Country’s largest tribes to plan and oversee its own road construction planning and transit projects without having to seek federal permission and oversight over projects. The Cherokee Nation is the first tribe in Indian Country to enter into such an agreement with the Transportation Department. The Tribal Transportation Self-Governance Program compact and funding agreement was signed by Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr. on behalf of the tribe and U.S. Department Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who did not attend the signing ceremony because he tested positive for COVID-19.
New Exhibit Shows Navajo Nation’s Suffering, Resiliency
AP News, Robert Nott, Santa Fe New Mexican, June 7
It was near here, in Billy the Kid country, that the U.S. government attempted to strip members of the Navajo Nation and Mescalero Apache tribe of their language, culture, and spiritual beliefs in the 1860s. The government had already removed them from their homelands in New Mexico and Arizona, forcing them to take the Long Walk, as it became known — a forlorn journey on foot of several hundred miles in which disease and death became daily companions. And it wasn’t just one journey; there were a number of long walks that took place over the years from different sites, including Fort Defiance in Arizona and Fort Wingate near Gallup. Once the people arrived here, they found a sandy, desolate desert landscape unfit for farming and bereft of fresh water. They became prisoners, then survivors, struggling first to just live and then to get back home. In the end, they succeeded, said Morgen Young, a historian who helped leaders of the Bosque Redondo Memorial/Fort Sumner Historic Site create the exhibition Bosque Redondo: A Place of Suffering…A Place of Survival.The exhibition, which draws on historical documents and oral accounts, takes the visitor on a journey back to the 1860s through today as it tells the story of people who ultimately found their way home and reclaimed their native ways. It’s not an easy story to tell — or to take in. Photographs, panels of text, and audio presentations of the oral memories of those who survived the ordeal paint a portrait of a government determined to wipe out an Indigenous population it saw as a threat.
Wilma Mankiller Quarters Released To Eager Public
Cherokee Phoenix, Chad Hunter, June 7
A standing-room-only crowd gathered in Tahlequah to celebrate the life and legacy of the Cherokee Nation’s first female principal chief, Wilma P. Mankiller, who is now immortalized on a U.S. quarter released June 6. Current and past tribal leaders, Mankiller’s family, friends, and hundreds of others turned out for the release of a limited number of the coins, which feature the late chief wrapped in a traditional shawl with “a resolute gaze to the future” on the reverse side. Mankiller, who served as principal chief from 1985-95, is noted as having fought for civil rights and equality, along with self-sufficiency for the Cherokee people. In addition, she is described as “the anchor” in establishing what has now become the largest tribal health care system in the country.
Scholarships Through Sports, Goals Beyond
Indian Country Today, Tess Kazenoff, June 5
“Sports was a way to get to college,” Deontay Begay (Navajo) said. “My family was really big on education, and so they were always encouraging us to get a scholarship for athletics.” If Deontay and his twin brother, Deondre (Navajo), hadn’t been recruited to Northwest Indian College, he likely would have stayed close to home and attended the local community college, he said. His aunt, who lives in Bellingham, helped the brothers connect with the coach at the college. Last fall, the twins finally stepped onto a college court due to the pandemic canceling his first basketball season and move to Bellingham, Washington, where the tribal college is located on the Lummi Nation. “We told our aunt that we wanted to go to college and play somewhere off the reservation in another state,” he said, “and now we’re here.” For Native students like Begay and his twin, sports can provide a promising avenue to education and increase access to colleges farther from home. However, despite the potential opportunities for recruitment and scholarships, Native students remain even more underrepresented in college athletics than they are in higher education. Historically, Native students have had the lowest college-going rates of any racial group. American Indians and Alaska Natives make up around 1 percent of all college students compared to around 3 percent of the U.S. population.