BIE staff cuts result in lawsuit from tribal nations, Native students
Kalle BenallieICTThree tribal nations and five Native students are suing the United States Department of Interior and Bureau of Indian Affairs in response to staff cuts at the Bureau of Indian Education and in the schools they fund and operate. In February, the bureau terminated a significant number of employees in the Bureau of Indian Education that helped operate schools in lieu of President Donald Trump's executive orders to reduce federal staffing. Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, lost more than a quarter of its staff and nearly one-quarter of the staff at the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, due to the federal layoffs that occurred on Valentine's Day. The cuts have led to disruptions in education, safety, student programs, student centers, financial aid and a clean environment.The Native American Rights Fund in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is guiding the case for the nations and students which include: the Pueblo of Isleta, Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, Cheyenne Arapaho Tribes and students: Ella Bowen, Kaiya Brown, Danielle Ledesma, Victor Organista, and Aiyanna Tanyan. 'They keep saying that these cuts won't impact individuals and services, but they do – they affect us a lot. Besides the classes that lost instructors, the entire school only has three custodial staff now. The school's restrooms have overflowing trashcans and no toilet paper. Students are cleaning up the restrooms themselves just to make them usable,' said Ella Bowen, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, in a press release. Bowen is a freshman at Haskell. SIPI student Kaiya Jade Brown, Navajo, who is named in the lawsuit, said it's been demoralizing. 'SIPI already was understaffed and things have gotten much worse. We had a power outage in my dorm for 13 hours because there was no maintenance staff available to restore power. I had to leave my dorm to find somewhere I could submit assignments,' Brown said. 'There also was a campus-wide power outage that cancelled classes.' Tribal nations said the BIE did not consult or notify them. The BIE is responsible for providing educational opportunities for Native Americans and Alaska Natives across the country, part of the U.S. government's trust responsibilities — the legal and moral obligations the U.S. has to protect and uphold treaties, laws and congressional acts dealing with tribes.'The United States government has legal obligations to Tribal Nations that they agreed to in treaties and have been written into federal law. The abrupt and drastic changes that happened since February, without consultation or even pre-notification, are completely illegal,' said NARF Staff Attorney Jacqueline De León.There are 183 bureau-funded elementary and secondary schools on 64 reservations in 23 states that serve about 42,000 Indian students, according to the BIE's website. It says 55 are BIE-operated and 128 are tribally operated. Haskell and SIPI are the only two tribal colleges operated by the BIE. 'Tribal Nations and the federal government should be working together to best serve our Native students. Instead, the administration is randomly, without preparation and in violation of their federal trust responsibility, taking away teachers and staff from already-underserved facilities. Our students deserve better,' said Pueblo of Isleta Governor Eugene Jiron.Some instructional staff have been rehired but not all. On Friday, March 7, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, an organization that serves the 34 tribal colleges and universities across the country, announced on social media that "25 positions recently terminated at Haskell Indian Nations University and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute have been reinstated" and thanked Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum for restoring this "vital infrastructure for Indian Country." "However, there are nearly 30 positions who serve critical needs at these institutions that still need to be addressed," read the statement. The BIA told the Associated Press it was department policy to not comment on pending litigation. A spokesperson for the Interior Department also declined to comment.The Associated Press contributed to this story.Our stories are worth telling. Our stories are worth sharing. Our stories are worth your support. Contribute today to help ICT carry out its critical mission. Sign up for ICT's free newsletter.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
How the Constitution treated Native American citizenship
'If you are correct in stating that geographic birth creates citizenship, how do you explain the fact that American Indians and their children were not citizens until Congress passed a law in 1924 making them citizens? If Congress had to pass a law making the children of someone born here, someone who never lived outside of the United States and never had allegiance to another country, a citizen, why would they believe that the children of someone who is a citizen of another country and in this country illegally, a U.S. citizen?' — Ed Hi Ed, The answer lies in history, context and the fact that birthright citizenship isn't based on parental allegiance. At the time of the 14th Amendment in the late 1860s, Native American tribal citizens were understood to be an exception to the general rule of birthright citizenship. Their historical exclusion was due to their unique political status, which doesn't weaken the citizenship case for babies born to noncitizens in the U.S. today, whether those noncitizens are here legally or not. Let's go back to the text of the amendment and work from there. The citizenship clause says: 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.' The 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof' language makes limited exceptions to birthright citizenship for people who aren't fully subject to U.S. law. That was mainly understood to exclude children of foreign diplomats, hostile occupying forces and members of Native American tribes. Because of the 1924 law you mentioned (the Indian Citizenship Act), plus the fact that we aren't occupied by hostile forces, that leaves today's exception essentially limited to diplomats' children. Tribal citizens were among those limited exceptions due to their special status, with tribes maintaining their sovereignty even while physically being within the United States. It's a complex relationship that doesn't compare to noncitizens who have no immunity from U.S. jurisdiction. So, if a citizen of another country is here illegally and has a child today, that child would be subject to U.S. jurisdiction, without the complexity historically raised by the relationship between tribal governments and the United States. The idiosyncratic case of tribal sovereignty and all it entails would therefore seem to be a separate historical issue that doesn't bear on the question of birthright citizenship for children of noncitizens today — at least not in a way that weakens the rights of the latter group. And even if we ignored the distinctive tribal context and history, which noncitizens don't share, the crux of the claim that noncitizens' children are less deserving of citizenship than the children of Native Americans is ultimately a parental allegiance argument. I explained last week why using parental allegiance as a standard is antithetical to the notion of birthright citizenship enshrined in the 14th Amendment. To the extent that the right can be viewed through an allegiance lens, it's relevant such that birth in the U.S. itself creates allegiance for the child, regardless of parentage. It's a level playing field, subject to limited exceptions. Of course, if the Supreme Court ultimately embraces parental allegiance, then all bets are off. But I'll point out again that administration lawyers don't seem confident that the court will side with them, or else they might have sought legal approval of Trump's executive order outright, rather than mounting a narrower procedural claim that doesn't require getting to the heart of the matter. Given that piecemeal litigation strategy and the fact that we're still awaiting a ruling on the procedural injunction issue, we may be far from learning what the justices think of your question. But the administration isn't rushing for an answer. Have any questions or comments for me? Please submit them on this form for a chance to be featured in the Deadline: Legal Blog and newsletter. This article was originally published on
The Intercept
an hour ago
- The Intercept
Trump Could Use Sacred Native Land for a Monument to… Columbus
A provision buried deep in the House budget bill allocates $40 million toward President Donald Trump's plan for a vast garden of larger-than-life statues — and it could get built on sacred Native land. The House version of the budget reconciliation bill passed last month contains funding for Trump's proposed National Garden of American Heroes, which would lionize figures ranging from Andrew Jackson to Harriet Tubman. While the garden does not have an official location yet, one candidate is minutes from Mount Rushmore National Memorial, the iconic carvings of presidential faces in South Dakota's Black Hills. Trump first announced his plan for a national statue garden during a July 4, 2020, address at Mount Rushmore in response to the racial justice protesters toppling Confederate statues. 'I'm quite sure that Harriet Tubman would not be pleased.' The potential statue garden site near Mount Rushmore belongs to an influential South Dakotan mining family that has offered to donate the land, an offer that has support from the state's governor. The Black Hills, however, are sacred land to the region's Indigenous peoples, and its ownership following a U.S. treaty violation is contested. One Native activist decried the idea of building another monument in the mountain range. 'I'm quite sure,' said Taylor Gunhammer, an organizer with the NDN Collective and citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, 'that Harriet Tubman would not be pleased that people trying to build the statue of her on stolen Lakota land have apparently learned nothing from her.' Trump's vision has had a rocky road to realization. Trump's announcement was meant to offer his own competing vision to the activists who sought to remove statues — by force or by politics — of figures like Andrew Jackson or Confederate generals. In one of the final acts of his first term, he issued a list of potential figures that alternately baffled, delighted or outraged observers. They included divisive — but inarguably historic — figures such as Jackson, who signed the Indian Removal Act that began the Trail of Tears. Also listed, however, were unexpected choices such as Canadian-born 'Jeopardy' host Alex Trebek, who was naturalized in 1998. Some of the names never got American citizenship at all — including Christopher Columbus. Joe Biden canceled the idea after taking the presidency, but Trump quickly revived it after his second inauguration. The National Endowment for the Humanities was placed in charge of commissioning artists, who are required to craft 'classical' statues in marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass and barred from abstract or modernist styles. The statue-making process has drawn its own skeptics about whether Trump can fulfill a vision of having the garden ready by July 4, 2026, the nation's 250th birthday. The process of selecting a site and building Trump's vision of a 'vast outdoor park' in time could be just as daunting, however. The Interior Department declined to comment on the site selection process, with a spokesperson saying that the garden was still in the 'planning and discussion phase.' 'We are judiciously implementing the President's Executive Order and will provide additional information as it becomes available,' spokesperson J. Elizabeth Peace said. One of the few publicly known site candidates emerged in March, when Republican South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden issued a press release flagging the Black Hills as a potential location. In his announcement, he noted that the Lien family of Rapid City, South Dakota, had already offered land it owns near Mount Rushmore. The Lien family, which has major interests in South Dakota mining projects, is also developing a theme park resort in Rapid City and a lodge nearby in the Black Hills. The family owns dozens of acres near the historic Doane Robinson tunnel, which offers motorists a framed view of Mount Rushmore. The vision of another monument in the Black Hills, however, would place South Dakota politicians on a collision course with some Native tribal members who have long lamented the creation of Mount Rushmore. The Lakota Sioux called the mountain the Six Grandfathers and ventured to it for prayer and devotion, according to National Geographic. The entire Black Hills were sacred ground for the Lakota and other tribes. The Black Hills were promised to the Oceti Sakowin peoples as part of a Great Sioux Reservation in an 1868 treaty, but the U.S. government broke its promise when gold was discovered there. 'The fact that it was built in the Black Hills was not an accident or happenstance.' The Oceti Sakowin Oyate, commonly known as the Sioux Nation, won a 1980 Supreme Court case finding that they had been wrongfully deprived of the land. They rejected the court's finding that they should receive monetary compensation and continued to seek return of the land. (Several tribes involved in the case did not respond to requests for comment about the proposed statue garden.) Some Indigenous people in South Dakota see the carved faces on Mount Rushmore as a defacement of land that rightfully belongs to them. 'The fact that it was built in the Black Hills was not an accident or happenstance,' Gunhammer said. 'It is representative of the exact colonial presence that the settler colonial project has always been trying to have in the Black Hills.' Mount Rushmore is a point of pride for other South Dakotans, as well as an economic boon. Sam Brannan, a Lien family member who supports the project, said she was hopeful that the White House would take them up on their offer to build another patriotic attraction nearby. 'We're just honored and hopeful that they will consider our site,' she said. 'The people they have selected are amazing. I hope everybody goes through those 250 names. They are very representative of the United States.' The statue garden proposal comes at the same time as a family-owned company, Pete Lien and Sons, seeks to conduct exploratory drilling for graphite in the Black Hills near Pe' Sla, another sacred ceremonial site for the Lakota. Gunhammer has been active in organizing tribal members against the proposed mining activity, which would happen on U.S. Forest Service land. 'The same company trying to build this national hero garden in order to preserve history is currently trying to undertake a project that destroys history for everyone,' he said. 'The same company trying to build this national hero garden in order to preserve history is currently trying to undertake a project that destroys history for everyone.' Brannan referred questions about the mining project to Pete Lien and Sons, which did not respond to a request for comment sent through its website. With regards to the national garden, Brannan said that Native tribes have not been consulted on the family's offer yet. 'Why would we? It's been privately held for 60 years,' she said. Still, Brannan said the tribes could be consulted if the project advances. She said no one organization can claim to speak for all the Lakota people, and that her family maintains warm relations with Native leaders. 'We have been in mining for 80 years in the Black Hills, so we have been great neighbors to the Lakotans here,' she said, referring to one of the subgroups that makes up the Oceti Sakowin people. In a statement, Josie Harms, the press secretary for the South Dakota governor, noted that the potential list of figures to be honored includes Native leaders such as Sitting Bull, the Lakota leader who defeated George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. 'The tract of land in question is private property owned by Chuck Lien and his family,' said Harms, referring to the family patriarch who died in 2018. 'As a result, it will cause no disruption to either state or tribal land. As a federal project, the state will be a partner with the federal government as it seeks to comply with its regulations or consultation, as needed.' The Trump administration has yet to detail how it will select the site for the statue garden, although numerous states and counties pitched the Interior Department five years ago. Brannan said it was her understanding that more than 20 sites are being considered. Her family has not had direct contact with the Trump administration, she said. One factor in the Black Hills site's favor is that the garden is gaining momentum at a high-water mark for the political influence of the twin Great Plains states of North and South Dakota. Former South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who first championed the idea, is serving as Trump's Homeland Security secretary. South Dakota Sen. John Thune is the upper chamber's majority leader. Former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum is serving as the secretary of the Interior Department, the executive tapped with finding the location for the garden. South Dakota's lone U.S. representative, Dusty Johnson — like Noem, Thune, and Burgum, a Republican — told The Intercept that the Black Hills have a strong shot. He has been pushing the idea with the Trump administration. 'I don't want to speak for the administration, other than I would tell you every conversation I have had with them, they understand the value of this particular parcel, and that they are going to give the Black Hills of South Dakota a full and complete look,' he said. 'We're going to have a real chance to win.' The House's plan to spend tens of millions of dollars on the garden is laid out in the same reconciliation bill that would kick 11 million people off health insurance, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office estimate. To make it into law, the spending provision would have to win Senate approval. Thune's office didn't respond to a request for comment. The House bill does not specify whether the money should be spent on the site or the statues. Money from hundreds of National Endowment for the Humanities grants that the Trump administration canceled could be redirected to pay for the statues, the New York Times reported in April. The National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts have jointly committed $34 million for the project, including $30 million from this year's budget for the statues. Some of the National Endowment for the Humanities grants that were canceled would have supported Native cultural projects in South Dakota. The roster of grants killed includes $60,000 for an anthology of Lakota and Dakota literature in translation and $205,000 for an Oglala language archiving project, according to a list maintained by the Association for Computers and the Humanities.
Miami Herald
3 hours ago
- Miami Herald
What our faith should tell us about DEI
When we have wronged others, common decency demands that we right the wrong. This means that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are not simply one more left-right spat in the ongoing culture wars. For many of us in the faith community, they are the attempt to make required atonement for sin. Human efforts to atone for sin, no matter how imperfectly executed, cannot be erased by government fiat. Our nation has grievously mistreated Native Americans, African Americans, women and other minorities throughout history. To make rightful amends, our institutions began efforts to diversify their staff, ensure equal treatment of all and to be more inclusive of minorities. The effort became known by the acronym DEI. Vilifying those efforts, President Donald Trump, his advisoes and a number of state legislatures have ordered DEI initiatives to be eradicated from government, academia, military, businesses and nonprofits. The purgers' mantra has been: We're diverse enough! Calls for inclusion and equality are Marxist attacks on the merit system. America is great again! We don't need to feel guilty, or to atone for anything. Injustices were committed, though, and a valid question is: How is adequate atonement determined? There is an anecdote about a saint in the Catholic Church named Jean-Marie-Baptiste Vianney (1786 – 1859). Referred to as the 'Curé d'Ars,' this humble village priest was known for being a wise spiritual advisor. One day a woman confessed to him that she had slandered another townswoman. Because the sacrament of penance requires that the penitent make reparations, the priest instructed her to take a pillow up to the church's bell tower, cut it open and scatter the feathers into the wind. Puzzled, the woman nevertheless complied. She then returned to the priest and asked for her absolution. 'Well, you haven't quite finished your penance,' Vianney told her. 'You need to first go and retrieve all the feathers that you scattered.' 'But that would be impossible,' exclaimed the exasperated woman. 'Yes it would,' replied the priest, adding: 'God certainly forgives you, my child; but I wanted you to see that there is no way you can adequately right the wrong and compensate for the damage caused by your calumny. Going forward, though, you must continue to take steps to atone for the sin committed.' The steps made so far by DEI to right discrimination have not even come close to fair and adequate reparation. Yet they are being halted by people who cannot own up to the fact that centuries of injustice have hamstrung minorities socially and economically. Objectors bristle at the thought of any inconvenience caused by the attempted redress of grievances. People of conscience in government, corporate, private, religious, academic and nonprofit institutions must forge ahead with DEI practices aimed at correcting historic injustices. These are a country's honest attempt to right past wrongs. The efforts, even if not always perfectly tuned or implemented, constitute a faith-filled nation's requisite and long overdue atonement for sin.
