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      in Elections

      Judge Orders Rail Operator to Pay $400 Million to Tribe for Trespassing

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      BNSF Railway broke its agreement with the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community when it ran hundreds of train cars a week containing crude oil through the tribe’s land in Washington State, according to a federal judge.A judge has ordered a railway company to pay nearly $400 million for trespassing on Native American land by far exceeding the number of train cars carrying crude oil that it was allowed to run through a tribe’s land, according to documents filed Monday in federal court in Washington State.According to the documents, filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle, the company, BNSF Railway — which operates one of the largest railroad networks in North America — committed “willful, conscious and knowing trespass” when it ran several 100-car trains carrying crude oil every week through the Swinomish Reservation, which spans about 15 square miles on Fidalgo Island in the western part of the state.Under an agreement between the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community and the rail company, one eastern-bound train, and one western-bound train, of 25 cars or less, were allowed to pass through the tribe’s land each day. But from September 2012 to May 2021, BNSF exceeded that allowance, with at least six 100-car trains traveling in each direction per week, according to a 2015 lawsuit filed by the tribe.Each week, the trains passed through the far north end of the tribe’s land, near a casino, gas station, convenience store and R.V. park, lawyers for the tribe said in the suit. They noted that crude oil, notoriously dangerous cargo, had resulted in derailments, deadly explosions and spills, as well as environmental contamination. BNSF ignored repeated demands by the tribe to cease its “unauthorized use,” according to the suit, and said it would continue running the same number of trains through Swinomish land. In a trial earlier this month, it was determined that the rail company had “breached the contractual obligations” of its agreement with the tribe, and that it should be stripped of the net profits gained through its unauthorized use of Swinomish land, Judge Robert S. Lasnik said in court documents that were filed Monday.In an email on Monday, BNSF refused to comment on the case, and lawyers representing the company did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Steve Edwards, the chairman of the tribe, said in a statement on Monday that the group was thankful that Judge Lasnik had ruled in its favor. He noted that the large sum the judge had ordered the rail company to pay reflected the “enormous wrongful profits that BNSF gained by using the tribe’s land day after day, week after week, year after year over our objections.”“This land is what we have,” Mr. Edwards said. “We have always protected it, and we always will.” More

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      in US Politics

      Kristi Noem banned from seven Native American reservations in her own state

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      The governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, is no longer allowed to step foot on large swaths of her state after another Native American tribe banished her from its reservation in response to comments she made about tribal leaders benefiting from drug cartels.The Crow Creek Sioux Tribe on Tuesday confirmed that the tribe had voted to ban the Republican governor from its reservation in central South Dakota. It is the latest development in a widening rupture between Native American tribes in South Dakota and the state’s governor.Noem, an ally of Donald Trump, has embraced his hardline rhetoric on immigration and in recent months has repeatedly linked drug cartels with crime on the reservations in the state.“We do not have cartels on the reservations,” the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe chairman, Peter Lengkeek, told NPR following Tuesday’s vote.“We have cartel products, like guns and drugs. But they pass over state highways getting to the reservation,” he continued. “So, putting us all together like that and saying that all tribes are involved in this really shows … the ignorance of the governor’s office.”The action comes a week after the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe voted to banish the governor and the Yankton Sioux Tribe recommended a ban against Noem. The governor is now unwelcome on seven of the nine reservations located in South Dakota, amounting to roughly one-fifth of state territory.“Banishing Governor Noem does nothing to solve the problem,” a spokesperson for the governor’s office said in a statement. “She calls on all our tribal leaders to banish the cartels from tribal lands.”In a social media post last week, Noem implored tribes to partner with her office to help “restore law and order” on tribal land and blamed the situation on the Biden administration’s failure to address migration at the southern border.In statements, several tribal members have accused Noem, once considered a potential running mate for Trump, of political opportunism and called her comments disrespectful and dangerous.“Our people are being used for her political gain,” the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Frank Star Comes Out, recently told the Associated Press.This is not the governor’s first clash with some of the tribes in her state. She was previously banned by the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council after she backed anti-riot legislation in response to the 2016 Dakota Access pipeline protests and again during the Covid-19 pandemic when some tribes implemented checkpoints to control the spread of the disease on their reservations.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This decision does not come after one or two incidents but after years of witnessing the governor’s harmful and aggressive actions against tribes,” members of the Yankton Sioux Tribe’s business and claims committee said, announcing their support for banning Noem, whom they called “anti-tribe”.The controversy comes as Noem, once considered a vice-presidential contender, reels from revelations in her memoir No Going Back that she shot and killed her family dog, Cricket, after it misbehaved after a pheasant-hunting trip. Facing bipartisan blowback over her actions, and withering ridicule, Noem defended her actions on a book tour, arguing that the dog had shown threatening behavior and needed to be put down.She was also forced to remove an anecdote from the book in which she claims to have met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, after experts disputed the claim. More

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      How Wild Rice Forecasts Climate Change

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      Manoomin, a crop vital to the Indigenous peoples of the Upper Midwest, has been threatened in recent years. But careful stewardship is helping to bring it back.Dwayne Jarman is often tinkering with the wild rice machines in his garage in this tree-lined suburb of Detroit. He has threshers to crack the hulls and winnowers to blow the chaff. He smiles and flips the switch. It’s time to process last summer’s harvest from his Anishinaabe homeland near Traverse City in Northern Michigan.“I want to do the rice all year round because I’m trying to reconnect to the things that matter,” said Mr. Jarman, a veterinarian. When he’s not working his day job, he harvests hundreds of pounds of rice, which he shares with friends and family. For him, harvesting and processing the rice is not only a labor of love, but also a preservation of an Indigenous food under constant environmental stress.Recipe: Wild Rice PorridgeClimate change and human impact have significantly depleted the natural abundance of manoomin, the “good berry” as wild rice is known in Anishinaabemowin, an Indigenous language also known as Ojibwe, and protecting it is synonymous with preserving cultural identity.Wild rice is sacred and central to the creation story of the Anishinaabeg, a vast cultural and linguistic collective that includes the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi. Under an ancient prophecy known as the Seven Fires, the ancestors left their Atlantic Coast homeland and migrated westward to the “land where food grows on water.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Widening Racial Disparities Underlie Rise in Child Deaths in the U.S.

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      New research finds that the death rate among Black youths soared by 37 percent, and among Native American youths by 22 percent, between 2014 and 2020, compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.The NewsThanks to advancements in medicine and insurance, mortality rates for children in the United States had been shrinking for decades. But last year, researchers uncovered a worrisome reversal: The child death rate was rising.Now, they have taken their analysis a step further. A new study, published Saturday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed growing disparities in child death rates across racial and ethnic groups. Black and Native American youths ages 1 to 19 died at significantly higher rates than white youths — predominantly from injuries such as car accidents, homicides and suicides.Dr. Coleen Cunningham, chair of pediatrics at the University of California, Irvine, and the pediatrician in chief at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, who was not involved in the study, said the detailed analysis of the disparities documented “a sad and growing American tragedy.”“Almost all are preventable,” she said, “if we make it a priority.”Flowers for Karon Blake, 13, who was shot and killed in Washington, D.C., in January 2023. Gun-related deaths were two to four times higher among Black and Native American youth than among white youth.Carolyn Kaster/Associated PressSome Context: A frightening trend examined more closely.Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Children’s Hospital of Richmond had previously revealed that mortality rates among children and adolescents had risen by 18 percent between 2019 and 2021. Deaths related to injuries had grown so dramatically that they eclipsed all public health gains.The group, seeking to drill deeper into the worrying trend, obtained death certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public WONDER database and stratified it by race, ethnicity and cause for children ages 1 to 19. They found that Black and American Indian/Alaska Native children were not only dying at significantly higher rates than white children but that the disparities — which had been improving until 2013 — were widening.The data also revealed that while the mortality rates for children overall took a turn for the worse around 2020, the rates for Black, Native American and Hispanic children had begun increasing much earlier, around 2014.Between 2014 and 2020, the death rates for Black children and teenagers rose by about 37 percent, and for Native American youths by about by about 22 percent — compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.“We knew we would find disparities, but certainly not this large,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine at the V.C.U. School of Medicine, who worked on the research. “We were shocked.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Jeffrey Gibson: Representing the U.S., and Critiquing It, in a Psychedelic Rainbow

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      People in Venice might hear the jingle dress dancers before they see them. On April 18, some 26 intertribal Native American dancers and singers from Oklahoma and Colorado will make their way through the winding streets and canals of the Italian city. Wearing brightly colored shawls, beaded yokes and dresses decorated with the metal cones that give the dance its distinctive cshh cshh rattling sound, they’ll make their way to the Giardini, one of the primary sites of the Venice Biennale. There, they’ll climb atop and surround a large red sculpture composed of pedestals of different heights and perform.The jingle dress dance, which originated with the Ojibwe people of North America in the early 20th century, typically takes place at powwows. In Venice, it will inaugurate the exhibition in the United States Pavilion on April 20. Titled “the space in which to place me,” the show is a mini-survey of the rapturous art of the queer Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson. Flags, paintings, sculptures and a video envelop and fill the stately building with proliferating geometric patterns, intricate beadwork, evocative text, a psychedelic overdose of color and political references to Indigenous and broader American histories.“How do I relate to the United States?” mused Gibson, 52, who in conversation slips effortlessly between earnestness and flashes of playful, dry wit. It was late December, and we were sitting in a room in his upstate New York studio whose nondescript furniture was dotted with evidence of ongoing work on Venice: a maquette here, paint samples there, a test flag folded loosely in a chair. The deadline for finishing nearly two dozen artworks was about a month away, but Gibson was calm — at least outwardly so — as he showed me images and the pieces in progress.“I have a complicated relationship with the United States,” he said. His ancestors were among the Native Americans forcibly displaced by the federal government. Both his parents came from poverty and went to boarding schools, where Native children were frequently abused. As his studio manager zoomed in on a digital image of a painting, I could see a large block of text surrounded by angular, radiating lines. Gibson read the title: “The returned male student far too frequently goes back to the reservation and falls into the old custom of letting his hair grow long.”The chilling line came from a 1902 letter written by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to a school superintendent in California about the need to assimilate Native students returning home from boarding schools. Once he found it, Gibson decided that all three busts he was working on for the Biennale should have prominent hair: a beaded mullet; long, flowing locks made from ribbon; and an elaborately-styled shawl-fringe “do.” The choice represents one of his artistic strengths: taking a point of pain and turning it into a kind of celebration, without losing its critical edge.Installation view of Gibson’s works at the U.S. Pavilion, from left: “The Returned Male Student Far Too Frequently Goes Back to the Reservation and Falls Into the Old Custom of Letting His Hair Grow Long,” which references a letter by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs; “I’m a Natural Man”: “Liberty, When It Begins to Take Root, Is a Plant of Rapid Growth,” which cites a letter from George Washington to James Madison.Brian BarlowWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Kristi Noem, South Dakota Governor and Trump VP Contender, Is Barred by Tribes

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      Four of South Dakota’s federally recognized Native American tribes have barred the state’s governor, Kristi Noem — a Republican whose name has been floated as a potential running mate for former President Donald J. Trump — from their reservations. The latest blocked Ms. Noem on Thursday.Three of the tribes barred Ms. Noem this month, joining another tribe that had sanctioned the governor after she told state lawmakers in February that Mexican drug cartels had a foothold on their reservations and were committing murders there.Ms. Noem further angered the tribes with remarks she made at a town hall event last month in Winner, S.D., appearing to suggest that the tribes were complicit in the cartels’ presence on their reservations.“We’ve got some tribal leaders that I believe are personally benefiting from the cartels being there, and that’s why they attack me every day,” Ms. Noem said.The tribes are the Cheyenne River Sioux, the Rosebud Sioux and the Standing Rock Sioux and the Oglala Sioux, which in February became the first group to bar Ms. Noem from its reservation. Their reservations have a combined population of nearly 50,000 people and encompass more than eight million acres, according to state and federal government counts. Standing Rock Indian Reservation, the third tribal area to have restricted Ms. Noem’s access, extends into North Dakota.The tribes have accused Ms. Noem of stoking fears and denigrating their heritage when she referred to a gang known as the Ghost Dancers while addressing state lawmakers and said that it had recruited tribal members to join its criminal activities.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Leading Museums Remove Native Displays Amid New Federal Rules

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      The American Museum of Natural History is closing two major halls as museums around the nation respond to updated policies from the Biden administration.The American Museum of Natural History will close two major halls exhibiting Native American objects, its leaders said on Friday, in a dramatic response to new federal regulations that require museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying or performing research on cultural items.“The halls we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples,” Sean Decatur, the museum’s president, wrote in a letter to the museum’s staff on Friday morning. “Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others.”The museum is closing galleries dedicated to the Eastern Woodlands and the Great Plains this weekend, and covering a number of other display cases featuring Native American cultural items as it goes through its enormous collection to make sure it is in compliance with the new federal rules, which took effect this month.Museums around the country have been covering up displays as curators scramble to determine whether they can be shown under the new regulations. The Field Museum in Chicago covered some display cases, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University said it would remove all funerary belongings from exhibition and the Cleveland Museum of Art has covered up some cases.But the action by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which draws 4.5 million visitors a year, making it one of the most visited museums in the world, sends a powerful message to the field. The museum’s anthropology department is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the United States, known for doing pioneering work under a long line of curators including Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. The closures will leave nearly 10,000 square feet of exhibition space off-limits to visitors; the museum said it could not provide an exact timeline for when the reconsidered exhibits would reopen.“Some objects may never come back on display as a result of the consultation process,” Decatur said in an interview. “But we are looking to create smaller-scale programs throughout the museum that can explain what kind of process is underway.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Former Navajo Nation Leader Is Running for Congress in Arizona

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      Jonathan Nez, a Democrat, is seeking to become the first Native American to represent the state in the House.Jonathan Nez, a former president of the Navajo Nation, will run as a Democrat for a congressional seat in Arizona — a bid that could make him the first Native American from the state to be elected to the House.The seat, in Arizona’s Second District, is now held by Eli Crane, a freshman lawmaker who was among the small group of Republicans who voted to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier this month. Mr. Nez announced his candidacy in a video posted Monday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.“I grew up in a rural, low-income home without electricity or running water,” Mr. Nez said in the video. “I understand the struggles that Second District families are facing right now, from the rising costs of food, gas and child care to increasingly devastating wildfires and health care deserts.”The sprawling district, which is larger than several states, includes 14 of the 22 federally recognized tribes in Arizona. But it leans more Republican after redistricting last year.Mr. Nez, 48, who lives in Flagstaff, Ariz., led the Navajo Nation, one of the largest federally recognized tribes in the country, from 2019 to 2023, a period marked by an enrollment surge during the pandemic. But last fall, he lost his bid for re-election as president of the tribe, a group that tilts Democratic.Mr. Crane, 43, a former Navy SEAL and a contender on “Shark Tank,” won a crowded Republican primary last year in the district, aided by an endorsement from former President Donald J. Trump.His arrival on Capitol Hill was hardly low key. At the beginning of the year, he was one of the notable holdouts among a group of right-wing Republicans who opposed Mr. McCarthy’s election as speaker, voting against him 14 times until Mr. McCarthy garnered enough votes on the 15th ballot. He voted “present” on the final ballot.That intraparty fight played out again this month, when Mr. Crane cast his vote to oust Mr. McCarthy.At least two other candidates have filed to run in the race: Lindsay Bowe, a Democrat, and David Bies, a Libertarian. More