Native Voice One Podcast

Students in Newfoundland and Labrador pleased about settlement talks with Canada

Report shows lack of access to high-speed Internet remains problem on tribal lands

Colville tribes reintroduces dozens of antelope to reservation in Washington state

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The Navajo Nation president recommends cultural training for high school basketball officials

Great Plains tribal leaders continue to speak out about Indian Health Service failures

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Senators deliver hard words to Indian health care officials at committee hearing

Washington state lawmakers examine restoring Columbia River salmon runs

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Report shows poor living conditions in Manitoba First Nations communities

First Alaskans Institute hosts Racial Equity Summit in Anchorage, Alaska

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Indian Health Service alerts Great Plains tribal leaders of changes

Native American business leaders say TV ad in Lakota is positive

Basketball program returns to Diné College after nearly 30 years 

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C-SPAN’S report from the 2008 Iowa caucuses. The 2016 caucus is Monday, Feb. 1.

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This week it's the Iowa Caucus.

The first state to vote in the presidential nomination contest. This is Trahant Reports.

Iowa uses the caucus system to elect its delegates to the Democratic and Republican conventions. People from various towns meet, debate a bit, and then stand with their candidate. Two things to note: Not that many people have the time to participate, usually it’s well below 1 out of five voters. And, second, IOWA IS 92 PERCENT WHITE and the STATE’S AMERICAN INDIAN POPULATION IS one half of one PERCENT.

The media surrounding the Iowa caucuses reduces the story to one theme: Who’s winning and what does that win (or loss) mean for the New Hampshire primary? Lost in the coverage is a thoughtful discussion about issues and policies. So we get political promises that might fit better in cartoons than in governing papers.

But that’s not the whole story.

There are 1,400 enrolled members of the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa/Meskwaki Nation located in central Iowa. And in Tama County, the population of American Indians exceeds 6 percent of the population.

The Sac and Fox Tribe Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa/Meskwaki Nation. Members of the 1,400 tribal community will be among the first to cast their vote for president on Monday night.

There is even a hot issue that ought to surface in a presidential campaign. The Iowa Senate last week enacted a resolution to end state criminal jurisdiction over tribal members, essentially repealing Public Law 280. Tribal members have been supported such a bill for several sessions with the goal of tribal jurisdiction.

This would be a great presidential campaign discussion. We all know the United States goes through dramatic swings when it comes to federal-Indian policy. Congress enacted Public Law 280 when the idea was to break up reservations and assimilate tribal people into the states. That policy, of course, was nonsense. And eventually rejected in favor of the self-determination policies of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon. But here’s the thing: The underlying legislation that promoted assimilation remains the law.

Congress never repealed its termination resolution, nor PL 280, but left them on the books as a legal layer that causes confusion. That’s why the Iowa legislature is enacting a repeal; It’s ahead of the Congress on getting rid of a failed policy.

The Iowa House will take up the legislation next.

And then Congress? Well, we shall see. But it would have been a great topic for the Iowa presidential campaign.

The only candidate to campaign on the Sac and Fox settlement was Bernie Sanders. In September he held a rally and answered a few questions about federal-Indian policy. The Des Moines Register quoted him: “..  the U.S government’s relationship to Native Americans has been a disaster from day one. … Everything else being equal, we want decisions being made by the peoples themselves, not dictated by the government.” Hillary Clinton also met with the tribal council, but there was no press and she did not bring any attention to Native issues.

An oil pump on Montana’s Fort Peck Reservation.

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Could low oil prices usher in a new era?

Indian Country has a complicated relationship with the price of oil. So many of our people (both reservation and urban) drive pickup trucks and the price at the pump becomes a daily worry.

On the other hand more than a dozen tribes and several Alaska Native corporations are oil and gas producers. So a sharp drop in oil prices impacts everything from government services to the number of jobs available locally. In 2012 the Bureau of Indian Affairs said royalties exceeded $900 million “and within two years, royalty income would increase to over $1 billion.” I don’t have the data yet, but that probably happened because the 2014 price of oil topped $93.

Then last year — oil crashed. The average for a barrel was $48.67.

There is another dimension to low oil prices: It could help speed the transition away from carbon-based fuels to our next energy source.

The Paris agreement on climate change sets a target of “well below” a temperature increase of 2 °C, with “net-zero green house gas emissions by 2100.” That means there needs to be a stepped up transition away from fossil fuels.

That raises questions about expensive projects to deliver oil and gas, such as pipelines and railroad cars.

Oil and gas will continue as part of the country’s energy infrastructure.

In North Dakota that means a 30-inch pipeline connecting North Dakota’s Bakken and Three Forks oil fields to Patoka, Illinois, a distance of 1,154 miles.

That’s roughly the same distance as the Keystone XL pipeline project. But because the Dakota Access Project doesn’t cross an international border, the approval process is routine.

Dakota Access Partners, the builder of the project, says it anticipates beginning construction this year and to “be in service by the fourth quarter of 2016.”

The Dakota Access Project would transport oil from North Dakota to Illinois. The goal of Dakota Access Partners is to have the system in operation by the end of 2016 and to move a half million barrels of oil per day. (Source: Dakota Access Partners map.)

There is an environmental case to make for pipelines. Oil that is not transported through a pipeline is shipped by truck or train. One think tank says if all the rail projects were built that would mean more than 100 loaded mile-long trains every week in the Pacific Northwest, often in remote locations where emergency response would be challenging.”

But the wild card in all of this is the price of oil. Many projects were designed when oil was traded at $75 a barrel instead of around $30. Currently there is far more oil supply than demand. So prices could go even lower.

Some oil companies have borrowed a lot of money to increase production and now are unable to pay their loa...

King County, Washington, called for more studies saying the rail system is “not built to handle the weight of mile-long oil and coal trains. This stresses an already dated infrastructure and increases the risk of potentially catastrophic derailments.” Photo credit: KingCounty.gov

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Are Native American voters divided over energy politics? This is Trahant Reports.

It’s tempting to think of Indian Country as a “singular” voice. The vast majority of Native Americans agree that the United States should live up to its treaty promises. Most of us think that tribes are the best mechanism for governing our lands and people. Add it up and it shows that if we all vote together, our voices will represent a powerful bloc.

Except, that is, when we disagree.

This should not be a surprise. The phrase “tribal politics” earns an instant nod from folks who understand that Native people have the same divisions — philosophical, tribal, and familial — that surface in any governing structure. Generations ago this was an easy problem to resolve: Leaders who found themselves in a minority, just left camp, and followed their own path. Today tribal people who have different ideas about the future, live and work in the community and use elections to determine the governing coalition.

Perhaps the greatest division within Indian Country is the debate about the environment and the extraction of natural resources. There are Native people on all sides of this question.

The Crow Nation in Montana recently furloughed some tribal employees, blaming Obama’s ‘war on coal.’ Crow is rich with coal — one estimate shows a reserve of 17 billion tons — and it is the primary source of tribal revenue as well as jobs for more than 13,000 tribal members.

While Obama might get the blame, the coal industry has been collapsing on its own. Its use as an energy source in the United States is being replaced by natural gas which is cheaper and cleaner.

The coal industry hopes to fix this by shipping more U.S. coal to China. There is a plan to build a huge terminal in Washington state. If completed, this would be the biggest coal export terminal in North America and account for nearly 500 sailings of ships transporting coal to Asia.

Northwest tribes are adamantly opposed to the terminal. Swinomish Chairman Brian Cladoosby told The Seattle Times: “Coal is black death … There is no mitigation.” He and other tribal leaders say that the project would be a clear violation of treaty fishing rights.

All this comes at a time when there is a worldwide push to leave coal and other carbon-based resources in the ground. It’s one way to hit the UN targets limiting C02 emissions. New data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says nearly 90 percent of the world’s coal is “unburnable.” Coal is considered the most polluting type of fossil fuel.

So the tribal bets on coal are coming at a bad time, both in terms of market-prices and meeting international agreements  to reduce emissions. Neither the Congress nor a future president can change...