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Congressman Bill Keating, sponsor of HR5244
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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM SENATOR CORY BOOKER thanking us for the "important testimony from tribal leaders" submitted to the Senate EPW Committee.
Senator Booker confirms that he "is opposed to any efforts to weaken the Endangered Species Act, including any attempts to interfere with the court decision in Crow Tribe et al v. Zinke." and has written a letter "in opposition to harmful ESA riders, which more than 30 of his Senate colleagues also signed"
Great article about Sen. Booker's support
Read Sen. Booker's letter of opposition
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Oct 18, 2018) The Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs (UBCIC) stands in solidarity with the 31 Tribal Nations that recently submitted a joint testimony to the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW), on the future of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and particularly the survival of the sacred grizzly bear.
UBCIC letter of support
Union of BC Chiefs slam GOP maneuvers against tribes
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Wyoming fights to keep the names of war criminals who slaughtered unarmed Blackfoot Confederacy women and children, and a geologist who advocated exterminating tribal people, unchanged in Yellowstone National Park. Park County, which hoped to be the hub of Wyoming’s grizzly trophy hunt, has opposed an intertribal petition to change the names of Mount Doane and Hayden Valley in Yellowstone.
Read about it here
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Senator John Barrasso and Rep. Liz Cheney maneuvere to legislatively nullify the tribes’ victory and once more imperil treaty rights, religious and spiritual freedoms, and sacred lands occupied by the grizzly and therefore protected by the Great Bear’s ESA listing!
Read about their underhanded actions here
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Incoming House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and Congresswoman-elect Deb Haaland (D-NM), joined fellow lawmakers Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), Rep. Ruben Gallego and Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) at yesterday’s Indigenous Solidarity Rally at the House Triangle on Capitol Hill in support of the Gwich’in Nation whose homeland and cultural existence is once more threatened by extractive industry development. To the Gwich’in, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is “Izhik Gwats’an Gwandii Goodlit,” The Sacred Place Where Life Begins, but to the Trump Administration it is coveted for potential fossil-fuel development.
Read the statement here
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION REVIVES TERMINATION:
The Wampanoag, the People of the First Light, need help, as the Trump Administration’s foray into reviving the Termination era has forced the Mashpee Wampanoag onto the precipice. “The termination of Indian tribes has been reintroduced,” declared Chairman Cedric Cromwell of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe...
Read More Here
See Article
Senator John Barrasso and Rep. Liz Cheney maneuvere to legislatively nullify the tribes’ victory and once more imperil treaty rights, religious and spiritual freedoms, and sacred lands occupied by the grizzly and therefore protected by the Great Bear’s ESA listing!
Gov. Inslee Appoints Native American Judge to WA Supreme Court
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GIC VIDEOS
NEWS ARTICLES YOU SHOULDN'T MISS:
'Treating protest as terrorism': US plans crackdown on Keystone XL activists
Documents suggest an aggressive response to possible protests against the oil pipeline amid fears of ANOTHER Standing Rock. . .
ngeline Cheek is preparing for disaster. The indigenous organizer from the Fort Peck reservation in Montana fears that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline could break and spill, destroy her tribe’s water, and desecrate sacred Native American sites. But environmental catastrophe is not the most immediate threat. The government has characterized pipeline opponents like her as “extremists” and violent criminals and warned of potential “terrorism”, according to recently released records.
Indigenous Women in Canada File Class-Action Lawsuit Over Forced Sterilization
In 2001, a 29-year-old Cree woman, nicknamed S.A.T. in legal documents, went to the Royal University Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada, to give birth to her sixth child. After she gave birth, she says, she was wheeled into an operating room to be sterilized. She says she desperately protested, but no one listened. To this day, she remembers “the smell of burning flesh” as her fallopian tubes were cauterized against her will in an irreversible birth control procedure.
This claim is laid out in a new class action lawsuit alleging widespread abuse of power by Saskatchewan health professionals and the violation of many indigenous women when they were at their most vulnerable.
The Interior Department Is Sidelining Environmental Justice
It appears the Trump administration is. . . undoing years of work to raise the profile of environmental justice within the department. In early September, the DOI quietly rescinded two policy memos that provided specific guidance on how to implement principles of environmental justice. The first memo, issued in 1995, instructed bureaus to look at impacts of proposed projects and, where necessary, to evaluate the environmental consequences on vulnerable communities or human health. The second memo, drafted two years later, addressed Interior’s responsibility to protect Native American trust resources and sacred sites on federal lands.
Monumental Disaster at the Department of the Interior
A new report documents suppression of science, denial of climate change, the silencing and intimidation of staff. At the Department of the Interior (DOI), with its mission to conserve and manage America’s natural and cultural resources, the Trump administration’s political appointees are stumbling over one another to earn accolades for disabling agency operations.
I should know; I was one of dozens of senior executives targeted by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke for reassignment in a staff purge just six months into the new administration.
Thirty-one tribal nations submitted testimony to the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) that denounced the majority GOP led-efforts to overturn Crow Tribe et al v. Zinke and gut the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The recently decided Crow Tribe et al v. Zinke saw a coalition of tribal plaintiffs and environmental groups defeat the Trump Administration, the states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, the NRA and Safari Club International over returning the grizzly bear to Endangered Species Act protections. Since then, Wyoming’s Congressional delegation, led by Senator John Barrasso and Rep. Liz Cheney, have maneuvered to legislatively nullify the tribes’ victory and once more imperil treaty rights, religious and spiritual freedoms, and sacred lands occupied by the grizzly and therefore protected by the Great Bear’s ESA listing..
Read about it here
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Tester Considers Introducing Stand Alone MMIW Legislation Based Upon GIC-RMTLC-GPTCA Recommendations - - The Reduce, Return and Recover Act
Read about it here
GIC ISSUES:
To the White Earth people, manoomin isn’t just a resource to be used — it’s an independent entity with the right “to exist, flourish, regenerate and evolve.” Tribes, and even some cities also are embracing the idea that Mother Nature has legal rights — setting the stage for court battles that could shake governments, businesses and the environmental movement.
MISSING & MURDERED
GIC is implementing MMIW initiatives to counter the endemic devastation being wrought on our communities by murders and assaults on Native women, children, and two-spirit people.
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PROTECT
GIC is implementing a Native American Endangered Species Act (NA-ESA) that we, as tribal nations, can implement on our lands, unburdened by federal government regulation. Central to the NA-ESA will be our Traditional Ecological Knowledge, so that the practices and tenets of the NA-ESA will be in accordance with our cultural values.
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DEFEND
GIC defends the sacred against the march of multinational extractive industry, be that in the form of pipelines, fracking, tar sands, uranium or gold mining, leach pit processes, drilling (in cultural sensitive and environmentally fragile areas), and the new “off-shore” drilling rush.
CLIMATE POLICY
GIC supports the Paris Climate Accord, and our positions on the climate crisis are diametrically opposed to those of the Trump Administration that has simply abdicated all responsibility and credibility on this issue.
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BORDERS
Trump’s southern border wall will devastate tribal communities, and further sever families and cultural bonds. The wall will also cause terrible harm to the environment and our two-legged and four-legged relatives; all that walk and crawl.
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UNDRIP
GIC works on providing standing and legal protection for tribal nations in the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon that are presently being decimated by extractive industry. Numerous uncontacted tribes are on the brink and are facing what our ancestors did some two centuries before.