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Tag: Indigenous people

  • House Republicans issue a subpoena to federal prosecutor in Hunter Biden’s case

    House Republicans issue a subpoena to federal prosecutor in Hunter Biden’s case

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    WASHINGTON — House Republicans issued a subpoena Tuesday to a federal prosecutor involved in the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, demanding answers for what they allege is Justice Department interference in the yearslong case into the president’s son.

    Rep. Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, called on Lesley Wolf, the assistant U.S. attorney for Delaware, to appear before the committee by Dec. 7, according to a copy of the congressional subpoena obtained by The Associated Press.

    “Based on the Committee’s investigation to date, it is clear that you possess specialized and unique information that is unavailable to the Committee through other sources and without which the Committee’s inquiry would be incomplete,” Jordan wrote in an accompanying letter to Wolf.

    The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The subpoena to Wolf is the latest in a series of demands Jordan and fellow Republican chairmen have made as part of their sprawling impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. His youngest son Hunter and brother James received subpoenas last week as Republicans look to gain ground in their nearly yearlong investigation, which has so failed to uncover evidence directly implicating the president in any wrongdoing.

    The inquiry is focused both on the Biden family’s international business affairs and the Justice Department’s investigation into Hunter Biden, which Republicans claim has been slow-walked and stonewalled since the case was opened in 2018.

    Wolf, who serves with David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware in charge of the case, has been accused by whistleblowers from the Internal Revenue Service of “deviating from standard investigative protocol” and showing preferential treatment because Hunter Biden is the president’s son.

    Republicans have claimed that it was clear that the prosecutors didn’t want to touch anything that would include Hunter Biden’s father. In one instance, Gary Shapley, an IRS employee assigned to the case, testified that in a meeting with Weiss and Wolf after the 2020 election, he and other agents wanted to discuss an email between Hunter Biden associates where one person made reference to the “big guy.” Shapley said Wolf refused to do so, saying she did not want to ask questions about “dad.”

    Other claims relate to an August 2020 email in which Wolf ordered investigators to remove any mention of “Political Figure 1,” who was known to be Biden, from a search warrant. In another incident, FBI officials notified Hunter Biden’s Secret Service detail in advance of an effort to interview him and several of his business associates in order to avoid a potential shoot-out between two law enforcement bodies.

    Justice Department officials have countered these claims by pointing to the extraordinary set of circumstances surrounding a criminal case into a subject who at the time was the son of a leading presidential candidate. Department policy has long warned prosecutors to take care in charging cases with potential political overtones around the time of an election, to avoid any possible influence on the outcome.

    Weiss himself appeared for a closed-door interview this month and denied accusations of political interference.

    “Political considerations played no part in our decision-making,” he told the committee.

    Nonetheless, Republicans are demanding Wolf appear before lawmakers as she has “first-hand knowledge of the Department’s criminal inquiry of Hunter Biden,” and refused a voluntary request to come in over the summer.

    Jordan wrote in the letter to Wolf.: “Given your critical role you played in the investigation of Hunter Biden, you are uniquely situated to shed light on whether President Biden played any role in the Department’s investigation and whether he attempted, in any way, to directly or indirectly obstruct either that investigation or our investigation.”

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  • Oklahoma trooper tickets Native American citizen, sparking outrage from tribal leaders

    Oklahoma trooper tickets Native American citizen, sparking outrage from tribal leaders

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    OKLAHOMA CITY — An Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper ticketed a tribal citizen with a current Otoe-Missouria Tribe license plate for failing to pay state taxes, prompting an outcry from tribal leaders who blamed Gov. Kevin Stitt’s increasing hostility toward Native Americans.

    Crystal Deroin, an Otoe-Missouria Tribe citizen, was ticketed for speeding near Enid on Tuesday and received a second $249 citation for failure to pay state motor vehicle taxes because she did not live on tribal land.

    “After over 20 years of cooperation between the State and Tribes regarding vehicle tag registration, it appears the State has altered its position of understanding concerning tribal tags,” Otoe-Missouria Chairman John Shotton said in a statement. “This change was made without notice or consultation with all Tribes that operate vehicle tag registration.”

    Most Oklahoma drivers pay motor vehicle taxes each year through the renewal of state license plates. But many of the 39 Native American tribes headquartered in Oklahoma also issue special tribal license plates to their citizens each year, based on a 1993 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving the Sac & Fox Nation that says the state doesn’t have the authority to tax tribal citizens who live in Indian Country.

    Many tribal leaders say they have never experienced issues with Oklahoma law enforcement issuing tickets before.

    But an Oklahoma Department of Public Safety spokeswoman said the 1993 ruling said Indians can only use a tribal tag if they reside and “principally garage” their vehicle in the tribe’s Indian country. In Deroin’s case, she lives near Enid, Oklahoma, which is about 45 miles (70 kilometers) from the Otoe-Missouria’s headquarters in Red Rock.

    Three other Oklahoma-based tribes, the Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations, also have separate agreements, called compacts, with the state that allow their citizens to use tribal tags regardless of where they live.

    “Other than these two circumstances, all Oklahomans must register their vehicles with an Oklahoma tag and registration,” the agency said in a statement. “Oklahomans who fail to do so are subject to enforcement under the Oklahoma Vehicle License and Registration Act, which may include a misdemeanor citation and/or impoundment of the vehicle.”

    DPS spokeswoman Sarah Stewart said the law has been in place and enforced since the 1990s, but many tribal leaders dispute that assertion and blame the Stitt administration for the change.

    “Governor Stitt’s position that Cherokee citizens living outside of the Cherokee Nation reservation unlawfully operate vehicles with Cherokee Nation tags is frankly, ignorant and unquestionably illegal,” said Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr. “Governor Stitt’s lawless and fact-free approach to tribal sovereignty is nothing new and his actions against our citizens will not be tolerated.”

    Stitt, who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, said his concern is that some tribal governments don’t share vehicle registration information with the Department of Public Safety, making it a “public safety issue that puts law enforcement and others at risk.” He said in a statement that members of tribes with valid compacts with the state won’t be ticketed.

    Stitt has had an increasingly combative relationship with tribal nations in Oklahoma, stemming from a dispute over tribal casinos in his first year in office in 2019 in which a federal court sided with the tribes. The simmering conflict boiled over this year into the Republican-controlled Legislature, which overrode the governor’s veto of a bill to extend agreements on tribal sales of tobacco.

    Stitt has said he’s trying to negotiate the best deal for all of the state’s 4 million residents, but in Oklahoma, where the tribes are vitally important to the economy, particularly in depressed rural areas, even fellow Republicans are scratching their heads at Stitt’s continued hostility.

    Earlier this year, Senate President Pro Tempore Greg Treat described Stitt’s 2021 choice not to renew tribal hunting and fishing compacts a “stupid decision” that has cost the state $35 million. Stitt’s office said at the time the compacts were unfair because tribal citizens could purchase licenses at a cheaper rate.

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  • Voters decide to restore language on obligations to Native American tribes to Maine’s printed constitution

    Voters decide to restore language on obligations to Native American tribes to Maine’s printed constitution

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    Voters decide to restore language on obligations to Native American tribes to Maine’s printed constitution

    ByThe Associated Press

    November 7, 2023, 10:20 PM

    PORTLAND, Maine — Voters decide to restore language on obligations to Native American tribes to Maine’s printed constitution.

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  • Victims of abusive Native American boarding schools to share experiences in Montana

    Victims of abusive Native American boarding schools to share experiences in Montana

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    BOZEMAN, Mont. — Victims of government-backed Native American boarding schools are expected to share their experiences Sunday as U.S. officials make a final stop in Montana on their yearlong tour to confront the institutions that regularly abused students to assimilate them into white society.

    Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, has prioritized examining the trauma caused by the schools. She was scheduled to visit Montana State University in Bozeman to wrap up her “Road to Healing” tour.

    For over 150 years, Indigenous children were taken from their communities and forced into the boarding schools. Religious and private institutions ran many of the schools and received federal funding as partners in government programs to “civilize” Indigenous students.

    The U.S. enacted laws and policies in 1819 to support the schools and some continued to operate through the 1960s. An investigative report released last year by the Interior Department identified 408 government-backed schools in 37 states or then-territories, including Alaska and Hawaii.

    The schools renamed children from Indian to English names, organized them into military drills and compelled them to do manual labor such as farming, brick-making and working on the railroad system, according to federal officials. A least 500 children died at the schools, according to the report — a figure that’s expected to increase dramatically as research continues.

    One of Haaland’s deputies, Rosebud Sioux member Wizipan Garriott, has accompanied her on the tour. Garriott has described boarding schools as part of a long history of injustices against his people that began with the widespread extermination of their main food source — bison, also known as buffalo. Tribes also lost their land base and were forced onto reservations sometimes far from their homelands.

    Victims and survivors of the schools have shared tearful recollections of their traumas during 11 previous stops along Haaland’s tour, including in Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, Arizona, and Alaska.

    They’ve told stories of being punished for speaking their native language, getting locked in basements and their hair being cut to stamp out their identities. They were sometimes subjected to solitary confinement, beatings and withholding food. Many emerged from the schools with only basic vocational skills that left them with few job prospects, officials said.

    A second investigative report is expected in coming months. It will focus on burial sites, the schools’ impact on Indigenous communities and also try to account for federal funds spent on the troubled program.

    Montana had 16 of the schools — including on or near the Crow, Blackfeet, Fort Peck and Fort Belknap reservations. Most shut down early last century. Others were around recently enough that their former students are still alive.

    A Native American boarding school school in the town of St. Ignatius on the Flathead Reservation was open until at least 1973. In southeastern Montana the Tongue River Boarding School operated under various names until at least 1970, when the Northern Cheyenne Tribe contracted it as a tribal school, according to government records.

    The St. Labre school at the edge of the Northern Cheyenne continues to operate but has not received federal money in more than a century, according to government records.

    The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition has tallied an additional 113 schools not on the government list that were run by churches and with no evidence of federal support. By 1926, more than 80% of Indigenous school-age children — some 60,000 children — were attending boarding schools that were run either by the federal government or religious organizations, according to the coalition.

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  • U.S. regulators will review car-tire chemical that kills salmon, upon request from West Coast tribes

    U.S. regulators will review car-tire chemical that kills salmon, upon request from West Coast tribes

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    U.S. regulators say they will review the use of a chemical found in almost every tire after a petition from West Coast Native American tribes that want it banned because it kills salmon as they return from the ocean to their natal streams to spawn.

    The Yurok tribe in California and the Port Gamble S’Klallam and Puyallup tribes in Washington asked the Environmental Protection Agency to prohibit the rubber preservative 6PPD earlier this year, saying it kills fish — especially coho salmon — when rains wash it from roadways into rivers. Washington, Oregon, Vermont, Rhode Island and Connecticut also wrote the EPA, citing the chemical’s “unreasonable threat” to their waters and fisheries.

    The agency’s decision to grant the petition last week is the start of a long regulatory process that could see the chemical banned. Tire manufacturers are already looking for an alternative that still meets federal safety requirements.

    “We could not sit idle while 6PPD kills the fish that sustain us,” Joseph L. James, chairperson of the Yurok Tribe, told The Associated Press. “This lethal toxin has no business in any salmon-bearing watershed.”

    6PPD has been used as a rubber preservative in tires for 60 years. It is also found in footwear, synthetic turf and playground equipment.

    As tires wear, tiny particles of rubber are left behind on roads and parking lots. The chemical breaks down into a byproduct, 6PPD-quinone, that is deadly to salmon, steelhead trout and other aquatic wildlife. Coho appear to be especially sensitive; it can kill them within hours, the tribes argued.

    The salmon are important to the diet and culture of Pacific Northwest and California tribes, which have fought for decades to protect the dwindling fish from climate change, pollution, development and dams that block their way to spawning grounds.

    The chemical’s effect on coho was noted in 2020 by scientists in Washington state, who were studying why coho populations that had been restored in the Puget Sound years earlier were struggling.

    “This is a significant first step in regulating what has been a devastating chemical in the environment for decades,” said Elizabeth Forsyth, an attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental law firm that represents the tribes.

    She called it “one of the biggest environmental issues that the world hasn’t known about.”

    The U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association said in a statement that an analysis is underway to identify alternatives to 6PPD that can meet federal safety standards, though none has yet been found.

    “Any premature prohibition on the use of 6PPD in tires would be detrimental to public safety and the national economy,” the statement said.

    The Puyallup Tribal Council called the EPA’s decision “a victory for salmon and all species and people.”

    The agency plans by next fall to begin gathering more information that could inform proposed regulations. It also plans to require manufacturers and importers of 6PPD to report unpublished health and safety studies by the end of next year. There is no timeframe for a final decision.

    “These salmon and other fish have suffered dramatic decreases in population over the years. Addressing 6PPD-quinone in the environment, and the use of its parent, 6PPD, is one way we can work to reverse this trend,” Michal Freedhoff, an assistant administrator in the EPA’s chemical safety and pollution prevention office, said in a statement.

    The chemical’s effect on human health is unknown, the EPA noted.

    Suanne Brander, an associate professor and ecotoxicologist at Oregon State University, called the decision a great move, but cautioned that the lethal impacts on salmon are likely from more than just 6PPD. She said she is also concerned about whatever chemical tire manufacturers eventually use to replace it.

    “As someone who’s been studying chemicals and micro-plastics for a while now, my concern is we’re really focused on this one chemical but in the end, it’s the mixture,” she said. “It’s many different chemicals that fish are being exposed to simultaneously that are concerning.”

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    Thiessen reported from Anchorage, Alaska.

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  • Fifteen Years Later—Justice for a Sacred Site

    Fifteen Years Later—Justice for a Sacred Site

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    It’s been 15 years since government officials destroyed my people’s sacred land. Wielding chainsaws and bulldozers, they uprooted our millennia-old traditions and reduced our holy site to overturned earth and scattered rubble. That senseless attack can never be undone. But recently, we finally received some justice for what we lost.

    I was a young woman when I first visited Ana Kwna Nchi Nchi Patat, known in English as the Place of Big Big Trees. It is a beautiful and sacred spot, nestled beneath the snow-capped peaks of Mount Hood in Oregon and surrounded by ancient, old-growth trees. Since time immemorial, my people have journeyed to this place to pray, meditate, perform religious ceremonies, gather medicine plants, and honor our ancestors who are buried there.

    However, in 2006, the government proposed adding a turn lane to the nearby U.S Highway 26—part of a plan to ease travel between Portland and tourist attractions like Mount Hood. Our tribal members soon alerted government officials to the religious significance of the land and pleaded with them to add the turn lane in a way that still preserved our sacred site.

    Our pleas fell on deaf ears. Two years later, government officials unleashed bulldozers on the site, cutting the ancient trees, desecrating ancestral burial grounds, and destroying a centuries-old stone altar. They did this even while admitting there were ways to add a turn lane without harming the site. It was harrowing. To see those trees fallen and the land ravaged by machinery was to see the very soul of my people crushed.

    We initially tried to negotiate with the government to restore the site, but we were unsuccessful. We then went to court with the help of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, arguing that the government’s actions had violated our rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Over the course of a decade the federal courts sided against us, ruling that the government would not be held accountable for destroying our sacred place, and that its actions did not burden our ceremonial, cultural, and religious ways of life.

    It felt like a nightmare that wouldn’t end. My people spent years in a legal odyssey that never should have begun. We tragically lost those who fought alongside us, like my dear friends Chief Johnny Jackson and Michael Jones, who passed away without seeing a resolution.

    With nowhere left to turn, we appealed last year to the Supreme Court, hoping to receive justice for what we had lost. We wanted the Court to make clear that Native sacred sites deserve to be treated with the same dignity as any traditional house of worship.

    Views of Mount Hood National Forest, a mountain and river wilderness area located only an hour and half drive from the city of Portland, as seen on Sept. 29, 2020, Oregon.
    Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

    And recently, with the Court about to consider our case, the government finally backed down. After negotiations with our attorneys at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the government decided to settle our case. It has promised to take concrete steps to restore our site to its original condition—replanting a grove of native trees, paying to rebuild the sacred stone altar, and recognizing the historic use of the site by Native Americans.

    While the heartbreak of that destruction will remain a dark chapter in the history of my people, this settlement comes as a bright ray of hope. The Place of Big Big Trees will never be what it once was, but it brings me peace to know that we’ll be able to gather there once again as we’ve done throughout our history.

    I pray that the next time the government considers committing another injustice against Native sacred land, it will remember what happened at Ana Kwna Nchi Nchi Patat. Holy places like ours shouldn’t need four walls and a steeple to be protected from government bulldozers.

    Carol Logan is a spiritual practitioner of the Clackamas and Kalapuya Tribe. She was joined in her lawsuit by Wilbur Slockish, Jr., hereditary chief of the Klickikat and Cascade Tribes of the Yakama Nation, descendent of Chief Sla-Kish, signatory of the 1855 Treaty with the United States.

    The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.