WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. – Crews from the Salt River Project and other power utilities are leaving this weekend to install electric power for the first time to thousands of homes in the Navajo Nation.
The effort, known as "Light Up Navajo," will wire more than 15,000 homes in northeast Arizona and northwest New Mexico, many of which have never been connected to the power grid. Bret Marquese, director of distribution maintenance with the Salt River Project, says they're one of 24 community-owned utilities from 12 states to support electrification efforts by the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority.
"Having homes without power in 2019 was news to us,” says Marquese. “And so, I think just the communication and getting that word out, right here in our own backyard, being a utility here in Arizona, obviously, and having residents in Arizona that don't have power was humbling for us."
Marquese says the project is coordinated by the American Public Power Association.
SRP's line crews will depart Tempe on Saturday to begin setting miles of wooden poles and stringing conductor lines through the Navajo Nation. The crews will be working in and around Leupp, Bird Springs and Steamboat, Arizona.
He says by Monday, they hope to energize their first home.
Navajo Nation resident Fannie Shorthair, who is in her late 70s, says she's waited her entire life for electricity. She says as a child, her mother used to reassure her that, "It would come, eventually."
She says when her home gets power for the first time, "I'm going to open my book and I'm going to read. And then, I'm going to make toast. And then I'm going to ... watch TV," Shorthair laughs.
Marquese says his utility will rotate its 10-person crews with a new group each week. A total of 26 SRP line workers will have an opportunity to participate through May 18.
"We've participated in Hurricane Sandy, in Puerto Rico last year,” says Marquese. “We've been to California a handful of times. And so, I just think it's a unique opportunity for us to help residents right here in Arizona and the Navajo Nation and help bring power to people that have been waiting for decades."
Marquese says about 15,000 homes in the 27,000 square-mile Navajo Nation – roughly the size of West Virginia – do not have electricity. He says it costs about $5,500 for the materials to wire each house.
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The Black Hills National Forest is one of the latest federal lands to enter a co-stewardship agreement with local tribal nations-a management model encouraged by the Biden administration.
The Pactola / Ȟe Sápa Visitor Center sits on the south end of the Pactola Dam, along the 1.2 million acres making up the Black Hills. A ceremony held this month honored a new memorandum of understanding for co-stewardship of the center, bringing together local tribal nations and the U.S. Forest Service to jointly administer the site.
About 80 similar agreements were made after a 2021 federal order, according to the Interior Department.
Ada Montague, staff attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, said the agreements are opportunities to make good on federal treaty promises; ongoing legal obligations the U.S. government has toward tribal nations.
"There's often a difficult history to reconcile with," Montague acknowledged. "That's usually a big first challenge. But when there are engaged folks on both sides who want to see something go forward, then typically the difficulties are more technical."
The technical challenges may be around the structure and terms of agreement, Montague pointed out, but there are increasingly more models for them, including a sovereign-to-sovereign cooperative agreements online resource launched by The University of Washington Law Library in March.
Tribes involved in the Black Hills agreement include the Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, Oglala, Rosebud and Crow Creek Sioux Tribes.
Weston Jones, who is Oglala Lakota and a summer law clerk for the Native American Rights Fund, said co-stewardship of the visitor center allows tribes to teach the public.
"They can share stories, they can share plant knowledge, animal knowledge, watershed knowledge and all the natural resource knowledge and pass that to their next generation," Jones noted.
The Forest Service said the center averages about 40,000 visitors a year.
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Members of the Nebraska Santee Sioux Tribe hope a solution to their five-year water ordeal may be on the way.
Their tap water has been unusable for drinking or cooking since 2019, when unsafe manganese levels led the Environmental Protection Agency to issue a "no drink" order.
Kameron Runnels, vice chairman of the Santee Sioux Nation, said a bill passed in the Nebraska Legislature allows them to tap into the state's Water Sustainability Fund for possibly as much as $20 million, although it is not a long-term solution. Ultimately, the tribe hopes to connect to the Randall Community Water District in South Dakota, which will cost roughly $53 million.
"Connecting to that water system would provide us that generational change to our water system and give us clean water for the next, who knows, maybe forever," Runnels explained.
The tribe is waiting to hear the status of its Water Sustainability Fund application, and a $20 million U.S. Department of Agriculture grant it applied for more than a year ago. For now, they continue to provide bottled water for the 800 members who reside on tribal lands, at a cost of nearly $15,000 a month.
A Bureau of Indian Affairs grant that covered the water costs for about a year recently ran out, but Runnels said they were just awarded a grant from the Omaha-based Sherwood Foundation which should cover another year of bottled water. He noted nobody knows why the manganese levels are so high and pointed out the Indian Health Service went to great lengths to try to find available safe water.
"They used ground-penetrating radar, using airplane flights, looking for pockets of water all over our tribal lands," Runnels recounted. "They did exploratory drilling in about 20 different sites but they could never find quality or quantity of water."
Runnels added the Water Sustainability Fund and the attention they are getting from state and federal lawmakers has been encouraging. He regrets other Nebraska Tribes were not helped by the new state law and said water issues are rampant among the country's Indian population.
"Somewhere around 50% of tribal households have some kind of water quality situation," Runnels reported. "They either don't have water or they just don't have clean drinking water."
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By Claire Carlson for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Eric Tegethoff for Oregon News Service for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration
A new public health clinic on the Grand Ronde reservation in rural Polk and Yamhill counties, Oregon, promises to address healthcare gaps and advance tribal sovereignty for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. The clinic, which opened May 17, 2024, will offer preventative services like vaccines, dental care, and nutrition classes to bolster the overall wellbeing of tribal members.
Officials working for the tribe say the new clinic will help the community take care of its own. "We're making sure that we can look after our own members and not be waiting on somebody else to provide some kind of help or service or something," said Ryan Webb, the engineering and planning manager for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, at a press tour of the new building on May 6.
The clinic will add to an already robust hospital system that offers basic and specialty care to the community, which means tribal members don't have to travel far distances (a minimum of 50 miles round trip to the nearest city) to access the majority of their healthcare needs.
Tribal members said this kind of self-reliance is nonnegotiable because of a long history of mistreatment by the federal government.
In 1857, the government forcibly removed the Tillamook people - a diverse group of Native Americans who lived up and down the Oregon coast in 29 distinct bands each with their own language - from their homelands and onto the original Grand Ronde reservation, creating the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. Over 300 Native Americans were forced to walk more than 200 miles to get to the reservation, a journey that's remembered by tribal members as Grand Ronde's "Trail of Tears." Once they reached the reservation, services like healthcare and education were promised to be provided by the federal government, but tribal members say these promises were not kept.
Then, in 1954, Congress passed the Western Oregon Termination Act that ended federal recognition of 60 tribes in western Oregon, the largest number of tribes to be terminated under any single federal law. This meant that the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, along with tribes like the Coos, Coquille, Siletz, Siuslaw, and Lower Umpqua, lost every treaty right they had with the federal government.
"Everything was taken," said Cheryle Kennedy, chairwoman of the Grand Ronde tribal council and former tribal health director. "There wasn't compensation or anything. It was, 'no, you're no longer Indian, no more identity. You can't receive any Indian service and all of your land is gone.'" It was the government's way of assimilating Native Americans into mainstream American culture.
The government was no longer required to offer any of the programs or resources extended to federally recognized tribes. Any property held by the tribes was taken by the government, which proved to be economically devastating, especially to the Klamath Tribes in southern Oregon who possessed valuable timberlands.
Eventually, after nearly three decades of lobbying, some Oregon tribes regained federal recognition, including the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in 1983. Their current reservation is roughly 11,500 acres in size.
The tribe has been working to rebuild their nation since receiving federal recognition for the second time, and a thriving healthcare system has been central to this effort. The first health clinic in Grand Ronde was built in 1997, and the tribe has been expanding ever since.
Currently, tribal members can receive optometry, pharmacy, behavioral health, cardiology, opioid treatment, and naturopathy services on the reservation. Kelly Rowe, the tribe's current health director, is working to bring endocrinology, rheumatology, and nephrology services to Grand Ronde. All enrolled Grand Ronde tribal members can get free health services from the hospital.
"The whole thought behind the big clinic was to bring everything here to Grand Ronde so people could get it without having to travel," Rowe said.
The newly-built public health clinic expands the hospital's preventative health services by providing a permanent location for vaccine administration (a need the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted), dental care, and nutrition classes. It also features an outdoor fish pit where tribal members can learn how to prepare traditional meals.
The clinic was built with support from Energy Trust, a nonprofit that works with utilities, community organizations, government agencies and others to bring the benefits of energy efficiency and renewable energy to more people in Oregon, according to an Energy Trust spokesperson.
Energy Trust pointed the tribe to sustainability grants to pay for the solar panels that cover the building's roof, which the tribe said will enable them to be even more self-reliant in the face of natural disaster. If their electricity goes out, the new building will still be able to power itself, keeping vaccines that require refrigeration cool.
Along with the technical support from Energy Trust, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde paid for the project using Covid-19 federal relief funds and tribal money.
"I think that [shows] the tribe's investment in healthcare for its people, because they're very committed to making sure that they're providing healthcare and providing as much as possible for the membership," Rowe said.
Claire Carlson wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.
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