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First Nations leaders met with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and provincial and territorial leaders in Ottawa Monday, in a historic gathering focused on Indigenous rights and economic development.
The meeting marked the first dedicated gathering of its kind in more than two decades.
Leaders agreed to explore creating a First Nations Sovereign Wealth Fund, allowing Indigenous communities to share in the profits of major infrastructure projects.
Carney also announced 260 million Canadian dollars – roughly $185 million – over four years to help Indigenous workers access employment opportunities.
The federal government pledged billions more toward emergency preparedness, fire protection, and Indigenous policing.
Leaders also discussed potentially reforming or abolishing Canada’s Indian Act.
The meeting comes amid concerns from First Nations leaders about protecting treaty rights and ensuring Indigenous communities have a meaningful voice in major development decisions.
A car attempted to cross a flooded area near Chinle, Arizona. (Courtesy Navajo Police Department / Facebook)
Storms have dropped intense rainfall in recent days on rural and tribal communities in the Four Corners region.
As KNAU’s Chris Clements reports, that includes a village on the Navajo Nation in Arizona.
Rock Point is uniquely susceptible to flooding. The community is sandwiched between several washes and drainages.
After the most recent storm hit Rock Point on Saturday, cornfields flooded and families had to be evacuated, says Valinda Shirley, a leader at the local chapter house.
“It was the most helpless experience I’ve ever felt.”
She has ideas for how to defend Rock Point against more flooding: build a levy, repair irrigation ditches, and stack sandbags.
The Red Cross is assessing damaged homes, but Shirley wants to know why the feds aren’t here.
“I do feel like the federal government should be here a little bit more.”
She says officials at an incident command team told her an upcoming storm expected to hit the area this Thursday or Friday could be just as severe.
(Courtesy NARF)
The Native American Rights Fund is deploying volunteers to highly populated Native communities to support voters casting their ballots, with Election Day only a week away.
KUNM’s Jeanette DeDios (Jicarilla Apache and Diné) has more.
Over 300 attorneys, law students and volunteers will be poll watching in over eight states including Michigan, Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nevada, New Mexico, and Montana.
NARF Senior Attorney Allison Neswood says there are low participation rates for Native American voters and part of the reason is a historical distrust in the system.
“We weren’t citizens until 1924, and even after that, a lot of states said, ‘Native people can’t vote unless they abandon their tribal community and stop these uncivilized practices.'”
There were also other things like literacy tests and poll taxes. Neswood says even though that is in the past, Native voters still face barriers.
“Native people have to travel the farthest in order to vote in a lot of cases, or a lot of our communities don’t have reliable mail service, and mail doesn’t get delivered to our homes, so it’s harder to use mail voting and mail registration. Maybe internet service and access to technology is not as prevalent in our community, so you can’t register to vote online. And then a lot of our homes don’t have residential addresses, which you know affects the mail, but also affects your ability to register, right?”
Neswood says the volunteers are there to help navigate any challenges that may come up for Native voters.
“Really just being there for Indian country on election day. I think you know all of these things just teach our people that this system wasn’t built for them, and so we want to push back on that. We want our volunteers to show up and really be a message to our people that like the Native vote matters, and the Native vote is powerful, and just support our communities in that way.”
Volunteers will wear hats with the NARF logo for anyone that needs assistance at the polls.
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