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With one swipe of the pen, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have allowed Native students to wear tribal regalia at graduation ceremonies.
The move drew a sharp response from tribal leaders – including leaders of the Cherokee Nation, where Stitt’s citizenship remains controversial – and civil rights advocates, who urged the legislature to override the veto.
“Should this bill become law, the proverbial Pandora’s box will be opened for other groups to go over the heads of local superintendents and demand special favor to wear whatever they please at a formal ceremony,” Stitt, a Republican who is enrolled with the Cherokee Nation, said in a statement to lawmakers announcing the veto.
He noted that “nothing in current state law prevents a school from allowing students to wear tribal regalia at their graduation ceremonies.” READ MORE — Richard Arlin Walker, Special to ICT
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The Navajo Nation Council is calling on New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to withdraw her appointment of a former governor of San Ildefonso Pueblo as Indian Affairs cabinet secretary. Passed unanimously in April by the tribe’s governing body, the resolution adds to growing opposition to James Mountain as Lujan Grisham’s pick to head the state agency.
Mountain was indicted in 2008 but never convicted on charges of criminal sexual penetration, kidnapping, and aggravated battery against a household member, leading members of the state’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives Task Force to demand his removal in February. The prosecution dropped the charges in 2010 due to insufficient evidence and the court record was put under seal.
In passing the resolution, the Navajo Nation Council joins Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren, task force members, and several New Mexico state senators in speaking out against Mountain’s appointment. Nygren wrote in a letter to the governor in February that his people’s voices “are so often unheard on concerns like this.”
Mountain staying on as secretary, the council resolution states, would “negatively impact the critical work” of the task force, which is housed within the Indian Affairs Department. READ MORE — New Mexico In Depth
Around the world: The Chinese government bans Uyghurs from praying during a religious holiday, a Filipino tribe gathers special coffee beans, New Zealand invests in Māori forestry, Alberta funds Indigenous treatment centers, and Australia supports Aboriginal heritage sites
CHINA: Government bans Uyghurs from holiday prayers
Chinese authorities prohibited most Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region from praying in mosques or homes during the Eid al-Fitr holiday, which marks the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Radio Free Asia reported on April 27.
Elders age 60 and above were allowed to pray at a local mosque in Xinjiang, China but were closely monitored by police, Radio Free Asia reported.
China has limited Uyghur customs and rituals since 2017 to curb “religious extremism,” with patrols and searches preventing private prayers during the holiday. READ MORE — Deusdedit Ruhangariyo, Special to ICT
Thousands of Native American remains in Ohio could finally be laid to rest under a provision that has passed the state House, the start of a process that tribal citizens have waited on for decades.
The Ohio History Connection, a nonprofit organization that works to preserve Ohio history, currently has over 7,100 ancestral remains and funerary objects like pieces of clothing or jewelry in its possession that should have been returned under a loosely followed federal law in the 1990s, a ProPublica investigation found as part of a look into U.S. museums and universities still holding Native American remains.
The organization has the third-largest amount of these remains in the country, following the University of California at Berkeley and the Illinois State Museum.
The language in the state’s operating budget paves the way for the nonprofit to use any land it owns — currently about 6 acres set aside for an intertribal burial ground — to bury the remains, The Columbus Dispatch reported. READ MORE — Associated Press
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Tribal and First Nations leaders were in Washington, D.C., last week for meetings of the International Joint Commission. That is the body that oversees the 114-year-old treaty governing the waters that straddle the Canada and U.S. border. Communities in British Columbia, Washington state, Idaho and Montana have been contending for decades that toxins are leaking into their watershed from coal mining operations in the province’s Elk Valley. Chairman Tom McDonald of the Confederate Salish-Kootenai Tribes was there.
The country’s first Alaska Native Congress member has just completed her first hundred days in office. ICT’s McKenzie Allen-Charmley has this interview with Rep. Mary Peltola.
The 2024 Presidential race is shaping up to be a repeat of 2020. ICT regular contributor Holly Cook Macarro joins us once again to review it all. She is a partner with Spirit Rock Consulting and a board member of IndiJ Public Media, ICT’s parent company.
Steam rose from snow puddles hours after melting across southwestern South Dakota over Easter weekend.
Deer are changing their migration patterns because of drought; magpies have nearly disappeared from the prairie, Native elders observe.
This is the shifting landscape of the Rosebud Reservation, home of the Sicangu Lakota Oyate, or the Rosebud Sioux Tribe.
Scientists with the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center in Colorado partnered with the tribe for a multi-year study of how the reservation’s environment will change in the next century.
The changes threaten the tribe’s economy, such as ranching cattle and bison, and tribal citizens’ lives with worsening storms like the December 2022 storms that killed six people, including a 12-year-old child. The changes prompted the tribe and scientists to create a Climate Adaptation Plan, which was released in 2022 and will be implemented beginning this year. READ MORE — South Dakota Searchlight
- Art bringing Northern Cheyenne students ‘closer together’: Lame Deer High students collaborate, find inspiration for upcoming art show
- Indigenous competitors celebrate culture and sport in Brazil: Organizers say at least 500 people showed up for the event
- ‘Rutherford Falls’ star to update ‘Uncle Buck’: ‘It’s a really exciting time to be a Native person in Hollywood,’ Jana Schmieding said. ‘Especially as a storyteller and as a writer’
- Jair Bolsonaro home searched as Brazil probes fake vaccine cards
- Why Hollywood writers are striking
- Joe Biden sending troops for border migrant surge
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