"As leaders of the Red Lake and White Earth Nations in Minnesota, we are alarmed that Congress is giving serious consideration to a plan that would take away tens of millions of dollars from some Indian tribes and give it to other Indian tribes.

This “highway robbery” is part of a Senate-passed Tribal Transportation Program funding distribution formula currently being considered by the House–Senate conference on the reauthorization of surface transportation programs.

The proposed changes contained in the Senate bill, S. 1813 (“Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act”, or MAP-21), would discard the longstanding “relative-needs-based” distribution formula for Indian reservation roads funding—a formula that was crafted by all tribal stakeholders over several years in a formal negotiated rule-making process—and replace it with a Senate-created, population-based formula that shortchanges tribes with the highest mileage of reservation roads within their reservation boundaries."

Get the Story:
Floyd Jourdain and Erma Vizenor: Stop MAP-21′s Highway Robbery (Indian Country Today 5/23)