Government
The “dental divide”—the absence of services and access to dental health services in low income communities—is real, especially in Indian country.
Dear Readers:
There's an old saying, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." It means the law applies whether or not you know the law exists. It's based on the idea that you have an obligation to know the law, and assumes that the law makes itself known.
Tony Hillerman used to say there’s more cultural distance between city folk and country folk than between non-Indians and Indians. Whether he was right or wrong, the categories overlap substantially.
Welcome to the laboratory-rat cage, folks. We’re all being experimented on by Monsanto and the federal government.
In April, President Barack Obama signed HR 933 into law. While this appropriations bill was fairly standard, a biotech rider included in it was not.
The uneven progress associated with fossil fuel pipeline projects on Turtle Island has taken on international dimensions recently. Eminent domain protests and leaking piped networks now routinely are in the news.
“Take only what you need and use everything you take,” my dad would say as we hunted game in the woods or walked the riverbank casting a line. He explained that our way has always been to be careful custodians of the gifts bestowed by the Creator.
The National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence presented its final report and recommendations to Attorney General Eric Holder in December 2012.
I am outraged by Supreme Court case Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. As a lifelong civil rights activist, I remember the struggle to pass the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in 1978 and the reasons it is still so badly needed to protect our families and Native American cultures.
Last week, grassroots opponents of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline hoping to halt its development were successful in submitting over 1 million comments before the State Department’s established April 22, 2013 deadline.
Upon reading my first column on the Baby Veronica oral argument, a policy wonk friend of mine wrote, “This is not about race. It is about treachery.”
BIA is proposing to furlough employees for one day each pay period through the remainder of the fiscal year through September 30, 2013 to offset funding shortages supposedly created under the sequestration bill.
In Indian country it is commonplace to say that the United States Constitution was at least partly inspired by the Confederacy of the Haudenosaunee.