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PAWHUSKA — Since the release of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” non-Osage headright owners have been attending Osage Minerals Council meetings, standing up and asking how they can return the headrights to the tribe.

They’ve also been calling council members to inquire how to do this, according to Minerals Council Chairman Everett Waller. Waller said he must tell the owners that it is not easy to return the headrights to the tribe because of legislation in effect since 1984. He is hopeful the Osage Nation will be able to overturn the legislation.

Osage Nation mineral headrights are rights to ownership of land on the tribe’s reservation. Owning the land means owning any minerals, such as oil and gas, that come from the land. Mineral profits are paid to the headright owners.

Federal statute from 1906 provided Osage land would be allotted only to Osage Nation citizens. It also ensured mineral rights would be owned collectively by the tribe regardless of who owned the land, thus the creation of headrights for each of the 2,229 Osage citizens then on the tribal rolls. READ MORE — Felix Clary, ICT + Tusla World

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Congress has passed and President Joe Biden signed off on an appropriation that puts more than $1.34 billion into Native American housing programs. The money is part of a six-bill Fiscal Year 2024 package.

U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawai’i), who is chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, told ICT’s Aliyah Chavez, “To be clear, even though it’s a $300 million increase, it’s still not enough. It is an acute problem. It is a problem that frankly took generations to get this bad. We shouldn’t take a whole generation to fix it, but it’s also not going to get fixed in one year for tribal housing.”

Schatz said the funding will go out to tribes as block grants, so each recipient gets to decide how to use it, whether for single family houses, apartments or duplexes, or even as subsidies for people who want to apply for a mortgage. ”Consistent with self determination for Native Hawaiians, Alaskan Natives and American Indians, we don’t tell them exactly how to spend these resources. Because housing is different in every place and every nation, every community ought to be in control of what kind of housing product and what kind of housing assistance to provide,” he said. READ MORE — Joaqlin Estus, ICT

The U.S. Department of the Interior is allocating more than $120 million to more than 100 tribal governments to fight the impacts of climate change, officials announced Thursday, March 14.

The funding — the largest ever awarded under the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Tribal Climate Annual Awards Programs — is designed to help tribal nations with 146 projects to adapt to climate threats, including relocating infrastructure.

It will go to 102 tribes and nine tribal organizations, stretching from Alaska and the Pacific Northwest to California, Florida and the northeastern United States.

Indigenous peoples in the U.S. are among the communities most affected by severe climate-related environmental threats, which have already negatively impacted water resources, ecosystems and traditional food sources in Native communities in every corner of the U.S.

“As these communities face the increasing threat of rising seas, coastal erosion, storm surges, raging wildfires and devastation from other extreme weather events, our focus must be on bolstering climate resilience, addressing this reality with the urgency it demands, and ensuring that tribal leaders have the resources to prepare and keep their people safe is a cornerstone of this administration,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, said in a Wednesday press briefing. READ MORE — Associated Press

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A major renovation at an Alaska museum to attract tourists to its Kodiak Island community got a boost from the American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association.

The association, in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, awarded a grant to the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository for a new project, “Keneq — Fire Gallery: Sharing Our Living Traditions.”

The renovation will expand the public spaces in the building to better serve the community through more exhibits. It also will include a large mural on the outside.

“This project is going to help us design a new exhibit in our gallery, as well as a couple of other things, including a statewide ad campaign for our museum and also a competition for artists for an outdoor mural,” the museum’s executive director, April Laktonen Counceller, told ICT.

“Our current building looks a little bit like an office building. It doesn’t have a strong cultural presence,” Counceller said. “I’m excited to bring the incredible culture that we have inside our walls to an outside wall so that people out on the street can see our building. And now, that’s the Alutiiq Museum I want to go visit.” READ MORE — Shirley Sneve, ICT

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