Past News Items

The Bureau of Reclamation has awarded a $20.4 million contract for construction of laterals and pumping plants for Block 5 of the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project in New Mexico, Secretary of the Interior Cecil D. Andrus announced today.

Granite Construction Co., Watsonville, Calif., has received the contract based on its low bid at the August 6 bid opening in Farmington, N.M., where the project headquarters are located. Granite has 580 days to complete the work.

CORRECTED COPY 11/27

Washington, D.C. – The Department of the Interior today launched a new effort to develop a Department-wide policy on tribal consultation, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs Larry Echo Hawk announced today. The new consultation policy will be developed with input from the nation’s 564 federally recognized tribes.

Regulations have been published in the Federal Register to cover distribution of nearly $3 million awarded the Confederated Tribes of Weas, Piankashaw, Peoria and Kaskaskia Indians by the Indian Claims commission under two different dockets, Marvin L. Franklin, Assistant to the Secretary for Indian Affairs, announced today.

Interior Solicitor Leo M. Krulitz announced today he will not ask the Justice Departn1ent to go to court on behalf of the Shinnecock Indians who are seeking restoration of 3,150 acres in the Town of Southampton, New York, which they claim is their aboriginal territory most in violation of federal law.

Bismarck, N.D. – Surrounded by fourth through eighth grade students at the Theodore Jamerson Elementary School, who joined him in viewing President Obama’s address on the importance of learning to their future, Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs Larry Echo Hawk underscored the President’s message by relating to them the importance of education in his own life.

I have just returned from nearly a week in Alaska, and it has been a real eye-opener. Every time I go to Alaska I develop some new perspectives. This week I returned with an especially strong feeling of the urgent challenges which must be met in the near future.

Today, Alaska is America's last frontier. Its history, its distances and climate and natural resources, and the many human factors involved, all combine to make it a unique land indeed.

The Department of the Interior announced in the Federal Register July 26 that a land use plan and a draft environmental impact statement for the addition of land to the Havasupai Indian Reservation are now available. The Department also announced that public hearings on the land use plan will be held September 11, 12 and 14.

WASHINGTON - Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Economic Development - Indian Affairs George T. Skibine today announced that a major oil and gas mining lease sale conducted this week by the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Anadarko (Okla.) Agency, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians (OST), resulted in 916 winning bids totaling $6,114,443.59. The agency is one of five within the BIA’s Southern Plains Region serving 24 federally recognized tribes in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

The largest cession of land to a group of Native Americans in the history of the United States is one way to describe the effect of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act passed by the Congress December 18, 1971.

Or, put another way, The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act will put about one-twelfth of Alaska into the hands of the Alaska Native corporations --an administrative device unique in the annals of solutions to aboriginal land claims.

Proposed regulations to establish rules and procedures for the conduct of an election of an interim Yurok Tribal governing committee are being published in the Federal Register, Forrest J. Gerard, Assistant Secretary Indian Affairs announced today.

Gerard said the action is in accord with his November 20, 1978, message to the Hoopa Valley and Yurok people and is intended as one of the first steps leading to participation by the Yurok Tribe in the management of the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation.