Trump administration takes Indian Country back to termination era
Posted: Monday, September 10, 2018 

Less than two months into the job, the new leader of the Bureau of Indian Affairs has set an ominous tone for the Trump administration's dealings with tribal nations.
Tara Sweeney, the recently-installed Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, issued a decision on Friday that paves the way for a reservation to be taken out of trust for the first time since the termination era. The victim in this age of self-determination and sovereignty is the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, whose homelands in Massachusetts are now on the chopping block.
But the People of the First Light aren't accepting Washington's dictate without a fight. An emergency council meeting is taking place at tribal headquarters on Monday to address what Chairman Cedric Cromwell described as an "unbelievably grave injustice.'
"We have been on this land for 12,000 years and we are not going anywhere," Cromwell declared after receiving the negative decision.
Key to the effort is legislation in Congress which would prevent the reservation from being taken out of trust. With the executive branch willing to walk away from any responsibilities, passage of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Reservation Reaffirmation Act appears to be the only hope for success.
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Documents indicate plans to spy on Native opponents of Keystone XL
Friday, September 14, 2018
ACLU sues feds for documents related to anti-protest activities
By Hunter Pauli - Montana Free Press

The ACLU of Montana on September 4 sued federal law enforcement, national security, and land management agencies for failing to turn-over documents relating to the government agencies’ preparations for protests related to the Keystone XL pipeline. The ACLU’s national branch is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit.
Earlier this year the civil liberties group began filing requests with the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of the Interior and the U.S. Justice Department, along with some state and county agencies, after reviewing a May 2017 report co-authored by Montana Department of Justice counterterrorism officials. The lawsuit said that report conflated indigenous protesters with violent “environmental rights extremists,” and revealed protesters’ free speech rights were being chilled by surveillance.
The tribal government of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation opposes construction of the Keystone XL pipeline in northeast Montana because it crosses the Missouri River just upstream of the intake for the tribes’ $300-million congressionally mandated water treatment plant and distribution network. The water network was built after pollution from oil drilling on the reservation turned much of its drinking water carcinogenic and saltier than the sea.
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Report: Border wall hurts wildlife, people now, full wall will be worse
By Vandana Ravikumar  Cronkite News - cronkitenews.azpbs.org

WASHINGTON – The existing partial border wall with Mexico has caused environmental damage, harmed border communities and failed to make the country safer, and a complete border wall would only make things worse, according to a report released Wednesday.
The report, “Death, Damage, and Failure: Past, Present, and Future Impacts of Walls on the U.S.-Mexico Border,” called for a pause on the funding and construction of “additional border walls, and a re-evaluation of the strategy that led to them.”
“So long as impact of border walls are not examined and quantified, and so long as alternative solutions are not duly considered, the default approach will always be more walls and walls in ever more places,” said the report by the American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of border and environmental groups.
But supporters of the wall disagreed with the notion that it would cause more harm and said it ignores what they called one of the biggest threats to the border environment – border crossers.
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