Native America Calling

As the nation commemorates the 100th anniversary of historic Route 66, some historians, scholars, and curators are offering a different perspective of the famed Mother Road. An exhibition just opened at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, Okla. that gives the public a view of the people, culture, and influence arising from the tribal land the road cuts through. A Diné culture educator is giving live presentations of research into the detrimental effects on Native people that the highway brought with it. And the American Indigenous Tourism Association’s Route 66 campaign encourages visitors to look beyond the neon and 1950s pop culture that is synonymous with Route 66, and take time to learn about the ways it transformed Native Americans connection to the rest of the country for the first time.

A rule change in South Dakota opened a door that allowed a sizable increase in the number of eligible foster parents. It is a boon for places like the Oglala Sioux Reservation that declared an emergency in foster child placement as recently as three years ago. The Minnesota Supreme Court turned back another challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) as the legal justifications for such claims dwindle. And we’ll learn about a Pascua Yaqui tribal secretary who has opened her home to more than two dozen foster children over the years.

Before a joint legal project between the Native American Rights Fund and the National Congress of American Indians started 25 years ago, tribes were losing 80% of their cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, they are winning 70% of those cases. That’s from an analysis just put out by the Tribal Supreme Court Project in conjunction with its 25th anniversary. We’ll look at some of those wins and losses and what they add up to a quarter century later.

We’ll also get updates on two important lawsuits in Oklahoma: a class action lawsuit claims the federal government owes as many as 10,000 Native land owners compensation for oil and gas development — and the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled against a novel jurisdiction agreement between the Muscogee Nation and the city of Tulsa, Okla.

The State of Alaska is moving forward with a program to kill brown bears across a 40,000-square-mile swath of land in southwest Alaska. The plan to shoot bears from helicopters aims to improve declining numbers of the Mulchatna Caribou Herd. Several local tribes and the Alaska Federation of Natives support the plan. Caribou are a subsistence food source. The herd peaked at over 200,000 in the 1990s, but plummeted to 12,000 by 2022. Conservationists oppose the bear control measures, arguing it lacks scientific evidence that it achieves what officials say it goes. We’ll explore the complexities of predator management in Alaska.