Indianz.Com > News > Cronkite News: State of Indian Nations remains ‘strong’ despite numerous challenges
State of tribal nations ‘strong’ despite crises, but feds need to help
Friday, February 26, 2021
Cronkite News
WASHINGTON – The state of Indian nations is strong, but the federal government still needs to “come to terms with the right of tribal Nations to chart their own course and their rightful place,” a tribal leader said Monday.
National Congress of American Indians President Fawn Sharp, in a wide-ranging State of Indian Nations address,
also pointed to long-running problems of disrespect for tribal sovereignty and of missing and murdered Indigenous women, as well as new challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The federal response to the pandemic on tribal lands illustrates the problem, said Sharp, who criticized what she called the bungled coordination of state and Indian health departments, saying tribes need a “single federal office and point of contact” for vaccine help.
Sharp did acknowledge hopeful signs in the early days of the Biden administration. Those have included a presidential memo directing federal agencies to increase consultation with tribes and the nomination of Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., to be the next secretary of Interior. Sharp hailed Biden’s “historic nomination of Congresswoman Deb Haaland as the first Native person to lead the Department of Interior, which more profoundly impacts the daily lives of Native people than any other federal agency.” Haaland, an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Laguna and a “35th-generation New Mexican,” according to Sharp, has a “centuries-old connection to and reverence for” the land that would serve her well as secretary, Sharp said. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is scheduled to hold a confirmation hearing for Haaland Tuesday. Sharp also welcomed Biden’s decision to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords, after the “past four years (when) the United States has been derelict in its own duty to act” on climate change, and his decision to reverse the Trump administration’s OK of the Dakota Access Pipeline through tribal lands. But tribal governments “demand and deserve” to be treated like sovereign nations when the federal government is weighing projects that affect tribal communities, Sharp said, specifically citing the proposed copper mine at Oak Flat in southeastern Arizona. “We demand and deserve a standard in which we come together as equal governmental partners working hand-in-hand to develop the laws and policies that advance the federal government’s trust and treaty obligations, or otherwise impact tribal nations and our citizens,” Sharp said. “We have the right as Sovereign Nations to say yes or no and that right must be respected,” she added.#NCAIECWS2021 #SOIN2021 #StateofIndianNations pic.twitter.com/GD0w5g09ZI
— National Congress of American Indians (@NCAI1944) February 22, 2021

Note: This story originally appeared on Cronkite News. It is published via a Creative Commons license. Cronkite News is produced by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
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