- Oklahoma governor’s feud with Native American tribes continues over revenue agreements The Associated Press
- Oklahoma governor’s feud with Native American tribes continues over revenue agreements Yahoo News
- Oklahoma Lawmakers Return To Capitol For Special Session On Tribal Compacts News On 6
- ‘Respectful cooperation’: Stitt, Anoatubby emails precede meeting of their representatives NonDoc
- ‘A Governor who refuses to respect Oklahoma law’: Senate Pro Tem sends scathing invite requesting AG assist in federal lawsuit KFOR Oklahoma City
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Tag Archives: tribes
Minnesota Governor Says Indian Tribes Could Start Selling Marijuana Before Regulators Approve Standard Licenses – Marijuana Moment
- Minnesota Governor Says Indian Tribes Could Start Selling Marijuana Before Regulators Approve Standard Licenses Marijuana Moment
- Marijuana is legalized, but Rochester law enforcement officials note not everything surrounding pot is legal Rochester Post Bulletin
- At Issue: June 4 — Walz signs cannabis bill into law; Rep. Omar discusses debt ceiling vote KSTP
- Feds: combining cannabis with guns or ammo is still illegal St. Paul Pioneer Press
- Marijuana legalization: Tribes could fill dispensary sales gap, Gov. Walz says FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul
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Bruno Pereira buried in his home state after ceremony led by Indigenous tribes | Brazil
The murdered Indigenous advocate Bruno Pereira has been buried in his home state of Pernambuco in Brazil after a small ceremony attended by family members and local tribes.
Dozens of Indigenous people from the Xukuru tribe paraded around his coffin chanting farewell rituals to the beat of their percussion instruments on Friday.
Topless and wearing headdresses made of palm fronds, they saluted a man who had spent much of his life working with isolated communities in remote parts of the Amazon rainforest.
“We will continue our fight without them,” one of the tribe’s leaders said in a short speech in front of the coffin and alongside Pereira’s wife, Beatriz Matos.
Pereira’s coffin was draped with flags of Pernambuco and his football team, Sport Recife.
The 41-year-old father of three died on 5 June when he and the British journalist Dom Phillips were shot deadon the Itaquaí River in the far west of Brazil.
Phillips was writing a book about sustainable development in the Amazon and the two men were returning from a reporting trip when local fishers allegedly attacked their boat. Shots were exchanged and Pereira was hit three times, and Phillips once.
Three men are in custody and more are wanted by police for allegedly helping to dispose of the bodies.
Although authorities initially said the killers acted alone, the officer in charge of the inquiry is now rolling back that hypothesis. “It’s possible that there is an intellectual author behind this,” said Eduardo Fonte. “The investigation is ongoing. We are looking at everything and we won’t leave any stone unturned. We’ll find out what happened, and what didn’t happen.”
Loggers, prospectors, ranchers and drug traffickers are all encroaching on Indigenous land in the remote Javari Valley, local groups say, and hunters and fishers are known to catch protected species of animal and fish. The locals claim organised crime groups active in the area could have been involved in the killings.
Pereira was working with an Indigenous organisation called Univaja. He helped tribespeople who lived in the Javari Valley to delineate their land and protect it from invaders.
Pereira had previously worked with Funai, the Brazilian government’s Indigenous foundation. He was removed from his post in 2019 after leading a successful operation to destroy an illegal mining operation on Indigenous land.
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He found a new home working with NGOs in the Javari Valley, monitoring the isolated Indian tribes who live in one of Brazil’s most farflung corners.
“Today the land where he was born receives him, his body re-encounters the clay, the roots of the plants, the water and the warmth of the soil,” the Observatory for the Human Rights of Isolated and Recent Contact Indigenous Peoples (OPI), one of those NGOs, said in a statement.
Phillips, a longtime contributor to the Guardian, is to be buried on Sunday in Niteroi, near Rio de Janeiro. The 57-year-old journalist is to be buried in a plot belonging to his wife’s family.
In a Return to the Land, Tribes Will Jointly Manage a National Monument
Bears Ears National Monument, whose red-rock landscape sprawls across more than 1.3 million acres in southeastern Utah, will be managed jointly by the federal government and Native American tribes in what administration officials said represents a “one-of-a-kind” model of cooperation.
The arrangement to preserve the national monument was ratified in an agreement that was signed on Saturday and commemorated with the unveiling of a new Bears Ears welcome sign, which includes the insignia of the five tribes that will help run the monument, the Interior Department said in a statement.
“Today, instead of being removed from a landscape to make way for a public park, we are being invited back to our ancestral homelands to help repair them,” Carleton Bowekaty, the lieutenant governor of the Zuni Pueblo tribe, said in the statement.
Mr. Bowekaty is the co-chair of the Bears Ears Commission, a group that also includes representatives of four other tribes that at some point were driven off the land: the Hopi, the Navajo Nation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation.
“This type of true comanagement will serve as a model,” said Tracy Stone-Manning, the director of the Bureau of Land Management, which is within the Interior Department.
Homer Wilkes, the under secretary of natural resources and the environment, said in a statement that the pact was a “one-of-a-kind cooperative agreement” that outlined a common vision for the management and protection of those lands.
The agreement requires the Bureau of Land Management to “meaningfully engage” with the commission on areas including land planning, management and conservation while working to protect traditions “that are part of the tribal nations’ way of life on these lands.”
The tribes and the government will also work together to develop public programming at Bears Ears and to “explore opportunities” to repatriate objects that have been removed from the land.
The goal of the arrangement, according to the agreement, is to ensure “that management decisions affecting the monument reflect the expertise and traditional and historical knowledge of interested tribal nations and people.”
Bears Ears is named for two adjacent buttes that rise over the landscape in an earlike fashion. Hikers prize its beauty and emptiness, while Native American tribes see the land as a center of a range of traditions, including hunting and storytelling, citing the stories told in ancient carvings on the monument’s sandstone walls.
National monuments are protected from development by law. They are similar to national parks, but monuments are established by presidents through the Antiquities Act of 1906, whereas national parks are created by Congress.
Bears Ears first became public land in December 2016 as part of President Barack Obama’s effort to bolster his environmental legacy before Donald J. Trump succeeded him. A year later, Mr. Trump shrank Bears Ears by 85 percent, seeking to use the land for economic development, particularly through oil and gas exploration.
President Biden reversed that decision last year on the counsel of Deb Haaland, the secretary of the interior and the country’s first Native American cabinet secretary. Ms. Haaland visited Bears Ears in 2018 while campaigning for a seat representing New Mexico in the House of Representatives.
“There are some pretty amazing ruins there, and, you know, I don’t even like to call them ruins,” Ms. Haaland told The Guardian in 2019. “The spirit of the people never leaves.”
Supreme Court Debates Limits of Ruling for Tribes in Oklahoma
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who dissented in McGirt, asked Edwin S. Kneedler, a lawyer for the federal government, whether criminal laws in Oklahoma were being adequately enforced.
“Is it a sustainable situation?” Justice Alito asked. “Is the federal government going to be able to provide enough federal agents, enough federal prosecutors, enough federal judges, enough federal courtrooms, enough federal probation officers, to handle the caseload that was previously handled by state law enforcement?”
Mr. Kneedler, who argued in favor of Mr. Castro-Huerta’s position that the state could not prosecute his case given the identity of the victim, said, “I’m not here to minimize the challenge that has resulted from the decision in McGirt.” He added that the federal government had shifted resources to the state and had asked Congress for $40 million for more prosecutors, F.B.I. agents and prison space.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, the author of the majority opinion in the McGirt decision, said there were good reasons to apply it to non-Indian offenders with Indian victims on reservations. For starters, he said, the Supreme Court had on some 10 occasions made statements in its decisions backing the idea.
Justice Gorsuch also cited the long history of state hostility to the interests of Native American tribes. “We have the treaties, OK, which have been in existence and promising this tribe since before the Trail of Tears that they would not be subject to state jurisdiction precisely because the states were known to be their enemies,” he said, referring to the forced relocation of some 100,000 Native Americans from their homes in the Southeast in the 1800s.
Justice Gorsuch seemed to urge his colleagues to stand behind the McGirt decision in the face of an outcry from some politicians and members of the public. “Are we to wilt today because of a social media campaign?” he asked.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who dissented in McGirt, urged an approach that would allow both federal and state prosecutions. “Indian victims right now are not being protected because the federal government doesn’t have the resources to prosecute all these crimes,” he said. “And this would not be displacing the federal government.”
Tribes Reach $590 Million Opioid Settlement With Johnson & Johnson
Hundreds of Native American tribes that have suffered disproportionately high addiction and death rates during the opioid epidemic agreed on Tuesday to a tentative settlement of $590 million with Johnson & Johnson and the country’s three largest drug distributors.
Together with a deal struck last fall between the distributors and the Cherokee Nation for $75 million, the tribes will be paid a total of $665 million. Purdue Pharma has already committed at least tens of millions more to the tribes in a settlement that is in mediation.
“We are not solving the opioid crisis with this settlement, but we are getting critical resources to tribal communities to help address the crisis,” said Steven Skikos, a top lawyer for the tribes.
Native Americans have endured disproportionately high opioid-related overdose deaths, by many metrics. In 2016, for example, Oglala Lakota County in South Dakota, home to the Oglala Lakota tribe, had an opioid-related death rate of 21 people per 100,000, more than twice the state average. According to one study, pregnant American Indian women were as much as 8.7 times more likely than pregnant women from other demographic groups to be diagnosed with opioid dependency or abuse.
The contours of the new settlement, announced in the U.S. District Court in Cleveland, the seat of the national opioid litigation, are similar to an agreement that the companies struck with state and local governments last summer.
If, as expected, most tribes sign on, the deal would be notable for its size as well as its acknowledgment of the 574 federally recognized tribes as a distinct litigating entity. Their voices have traditionally been excluded or downplayed in earlier national settlements involving the states, such as the landmark settlement with the big tobacco companies in the 1990s.
Roughly 15 percent of the total will go toward legal fees and other litigation costs, but the bulk will be directed to addiction treatment and prevention programs, to be overseen by tribal health care experts.
“My tribe has already committed to use any proceeds to confront the opioid crisis,” said Chairman Aaron Payment of the Sault Ste. Marie tribe of Chippewa in Michigan, which has 45,000 members. “The impact of the opioid epidemic is pervasive, such that tribes need all the resources we can secure to make our tribal communities whole once again.”
A signature development in this deal is the timetable, which is far faster than the one tentatively agreed to last summer with states and local governments. Johnson & Johnson will pay the tribes its $150 million portion over two years, starting as soon as the deal is finalized; the distributors — AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson — will pay $440 million over six and a half years.
By contrast, the drug manufacturer will pay thousands of local governments and states $5 billion over nine years, with the distributors paying $21 billion over 18 years.
The distributors did not respond to requests for comment or declined to speak about the settlement. Johnson & Johnson said that the settlement did not represent an admission of wrongdoing. The company said that it would continue to defend itself in other cases.
Although about 175 tribes filed cases against these and other pharmaceutical industry companies, the rest of the 574 tribes will benefit as well. Tribes range in population size from roughly 400,000 to a mere handful of people. According to 2018 census data, 6.8 million people identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, or 2.1 percent of the American population, of which slightly less than half live on or near tribal lands and are probably eligible to receive tribal services such as health care.
The agreement will go forward after an overwhelming majority of the tribes that sued have signed on. Then money will be allocated to all tribes, regardless of whether they filed a case.
Lloyd B. Miller, a lead lawyer for the tribes, said that the settlement “provides outsized funding as compared to the states on a per-capita basis because the opioid disaster caused outsized and disproportionate devastation across tribal communities.”
Geoffrey Strommer, a lawyer for the tribes, said the tribes were determined that the bitter outcome of the Big Tobacco litigation more than two decades earlier not be repeated in the opioid litigation.
In the Big Tobacco litigation, a court blocked the tribes from suing. And though states used tribal population and the impact of cigarettes on tribal health during negotiations with tobacco companies, Mr. Strommer said that the states never set aside money from the Big Tobacco funds for the tribes themselves.
So the question of whether tribes would get their own seat at the negotiating table against the pharmaceutical companies or would be excluded altogether was vigorously debated, according to several lawyers familiar with the talks.
Judge Dan Aaron Polster, who is presiding over thousands of opioid cases merged in Federal District Court in Cleveland, insisted the tribes had an equal right to bring their own cases, independent of the states.
Redwood Forest in California Is Returned to Native Tribes
Tucked away in Northern California’s Mendocino County, the 523 acres of rugged forest is studded with the ghostlike stumps of ancient redwoods harvested during a logging boom that did away with over 90 percent of the species on the West Coast. But about 200 acres are still dense with old-growth redwoods that were spared from logging.
The land was the hunting, fishing and ceremonial grounds of generations of Indigenous tribes like the Sinkyone, until they were largely driven off by European settlers. On Tuesday, a California nonprofit organization dedicated to conserving and preserving redwoods announced that it was reuniting the land and its original inhabitants.
The group, the Save the Redwoods League, which was able to purchase the forest with corporate donations in 2020, said it was transferring ownership of the 523-acre property to the Intertribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, a group of 10 Native tribes whose ancestors were “forcibly removed” from the land by European American settlers, according to a statement from the league.
The tribes will serve as guardians of the land in partnership with the Save the Redwoods League, which has been protecting and restoring redwood forests since 1918.
“Fundamentally, we believed that the best way to permanently protect and heal this land is through tribal stewardship,” Sam Hodder, chief executive of the Save the Redwoods League, said in an interview on Tuesday. “In this process, we have an opportunity to restore balance in the ecosystem and in the communities connected to it.”
For over 175 years, members of the tribes represented by the council did not have access to the sacred land they had used for hunting, fishing and ceremonies.
“It is rare when these lands return to the original peoples of those places,” Hawk Rosales, an Indigenous land defender and a former executive director of the Intertribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, said in an interview on Tuesday.
“We have an intergenerational commitment and a goal to protect these lands and, in doing so, protecting tribal cultural ways of life and revitalizing them,” he added.
As part of the agreement, the land, known before the purchase as Andersonia West, will be called Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ (pronounced tsih-ih-LEY-duhn), which means “Fish Run Place” in the Sinkyone language.
“Renaming the property Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ lets people know that it’s a sacred place; it’s a place for our Native people,” Crista Ray, a board member of the Sinkyone Council, said in the statement. “It lets them know that there was a language and that there was a people who lived there long before now.”
According to the statement, Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ is a vital addition to conserved lands along the Sinkyone coast, which is about five hours north of San Francisco. The newly acquired land sits west of the Sinkyone Wilderness State Park and north of the Intertribal Sinkyone Wilderness, another protected area, which was acquired by the Sinkyone Council in 1997.
The council’s goal, Mr. Rosales explained, is to connect and expand the redwood forests in the area, which are ecologically and culturally linked, to repair “components of an ecosystem that has been fragmented and that has been threatened” by colonial settlement.
Redwood trees aren’t the only endangered species in the forest. The land is also home to coho salmon, steelhead trout, marbled murrelets (a small seabird) and northern spotted owls — all listed under the Endangered Species Act.
Since 2006, the Redwoods League had been in conversations with a California logging family who had owned the land for generations. Mr. Hodder explained that after years of building a relationship with the family, the league was able to purchase the land in 2020 for $3.55 million. The money for the purchase was donated by the Pacific Gas & Electric Company as part of its program to mitigate environmental damage.
The Redwoods League still retains an easement on the property. “Our goal is to just make sure that we are adding to adding capacity and support for the council as they advance their own stewardship and restoration goals,” Mr. Hodder explained.
This is the second time the Save the Redwoods League has donated land to the council. In 2012, it transferred a 164-acre property north of Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ, known as Four Corners, to the Sinkyone.
To Mr. Rosales, the importance of piecing together these culturally important lands is not only the conservation of nature, but also allowing tribes to have a stronger connection with their ancestors.
“The descendants of those ancestors are among us today in the member tribes,” Mr. Rosales said. “There are families that trace their lineage to this place, essentially, and the surrounding vicinity. They are connected to their ancestors, and this is a way of reaffirming that.”
Cherokee Nation chief wants Jeep to stop using tribe’s name
The chief of the Cherokee Nation wants Jeep to stop using the tribe’s name on its vehicles.
“I’m sure this comes from a place that is well-intended, but it does not honor us by having our name plastered on the side of a car,” Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, said in a statement.
A Cherokee Nation spokesperson confirmed the statement, which was provided to Car and Driver and published Monday. It was sent to the auto magazine after an inquiry in January.
“Our vehicle names have been carefully chosen and nurtured over the years to honor and celebrate Native American people for their nobility, prowess and pride,” Stellantis, the company that owns Jeep, said in a statement.
Two Jeep vehicles use the name, the Cherokee and the Grand Cherokee, both of which are sport utility vehicles. The original Cherokee was launched in 1974.
The Jeep Cherokee remained in production through 2001 and was replaced by the Liberty. In 2013, Jeep announced a return to the name for the Liberty’s replacement. The Grand Cherokee was introduced with the 1993 model year.
“We are, more than ever, committed to a respectful and open dialogue with Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr,” the company said.
Stellantis and Hoskin had a Zoom call late last month after the company reached out, the Cherokee Nation spokesperson said.
Hoskin told Stellantis that he does not condone the use of the word “Cherokee” by the company, the spokesperson said.
Hoskin told CNBC that the discussions were “good” and “genuine,” but he did not change his stance.
“I think we’re in a day and age in this country where it’s time for both corporations and team sports to retire the use of Native American names, images and mascots from their products, team jerseys and sports in general,” Hoskin said in his statement.
Some have recently done so — the Washington, D.C., NFL team announced in July that it would retire its name and logo, which had long been viewed as slurs. It’s now called Washington Football Team until it settles on a new name.
And in December, Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team announced that it would change its name after the 2021 season. The team has not said what the new name will be other than that it will be a “new non-Native American based name.”
Cleveland announced in 2018 that it would drop its Chief Wahoo logo, a racist caricature, from its caps and jerseys.
More than 141,000 Cherokee Nation citizens live within the tribe’s reservation boundaries in northeastern Oklahoma.