House Passes Bipartisan Legislation to Boost Support for Indigenous Entrepreneurs yahoo.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yahoo.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Tribal partners working with the US Forest Service have a chance to bolster their capacity for wildfire fighting and prevention projects thanks to a $500 million investment announced by the USDA during a Tuesday press call. The investment includes $400 million to support ongoing efforts across 21 priority landscapes, including many regions that include tribal forests, projects and communities, as well as $100 million to launch the Collaborative Wildfire Risk Reduction Program (CWRRP). Tribes in 24 qualifying states are among eligible partners for the CWRRP, which will focus funding on “non-traditional partners” representing minority and underserved communities.
The Department of Agriculture Forest Service announces a $20 million grant program to empower federally recognized tribes, Alaska Native Corporations, and villages in accessing emerging climate markets.
The Tohono O’oodham Nation and San Carlos Apache Tribe, joining with Archaeology Southwest and the Center for Biological Diversity, have aimed a new lawsuit at the federal government for their role in permitting a high voltage transmission line across sacred sites. The lawsuit, filed on Jan. 17, alleges that the Bureau of Land Management and the Department of the Interior ignored executive orders and federal laws that would protect sacred sites from a part of Pattern Energy’s SunZia energy project, which aims to establish clean energy infrastructure between Arizona and New Mexico.
Ute Mountain Ute Tribe council member Lyndreth Hemp Wall has been ordered into a halfway house in Denver, Colorado by U.S. Magistrate Judge James Candelaria amid accusations of sexual abuse on the tribe’s reservation. Wall will remain in the Denver halfway house until a spot opens up in a Durango, Colorado facility, per a report from the Cortez, Colorado-based publication The Journal. The decision comes after the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced a federal indictment against Wall on 12 charges of sexual abuse that allegedly occurred on the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s reservation from 1997 to 2017.