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Photo: Roylene Comes At Night, left, State Conservationist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Washington, Robert Bonnie, Under Secretary of Agriculture for Farm Production and Conservation, and state leaders toured multiple sites associated with the Odessa Groundwater Replacement Program throughout central Washington on June 6, 2024. (Nate Gallahan / USDA / Public Domain)
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a new plan to strengthen its collaboration with tribes. And help them build more sustainable food systems.
The Mountain West News Bureau’s Kaleb Roedel has more.
Nationwide, there are 574 federally recognized tribes.
Nearly half of them are in the West – where tribes manage or farm more than 55 million acres of land.
The USDA’s new strategy aims to help tribes better protect and preserve the natural resources and farmland they rely on.
That includes dedicating more staff and funding to conservation across tribal lands. And incorporating Indigenous knowledge into that work.
Roylene Comes At Night is a conservationist with the agency and a member of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana.
“This gives us an opportunity to now build this tribe by tribe, so that each tribal nation that has their own concerns can adapt and adopt those concerns to meet their needs.”
She says, overall, the new strategy supports tribes’ cultural and farming traditions – and will make sure their priorities and knowledge shape future federal policies.
Students and tribal members at the Fort Washakie School visited the site along with researchers from the University of Wisconsin. (Photo: David Lovelace)
A new study profiles a recently discovered species of amphibian that survived harsh Wyoming weather by burrowing into the ground.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Chris Clements has more on the slimy tetrapods, which lived near the Wind River Reservation millions of years ago.
University of Wisconsin researcher Dave Lovelace came across the fossils, still preserved in their burrows, on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land near Dubois, Wyo.
He returned there over the years, eventually partnering with the Eastern Shoshone Tribe to bring local middle school students and elders to the site.
The idea was to have researchers talk about the fossils, and for elders of the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes to discuss their knowledge of the creatures.
“Looking at weaving those two narratives together. We don’t have that built in knowledge and history.”
Reba Teran is Eastern Shoshone and a co-author of the paper.
She named the species Ninumbeehan dookoodukah, two Shoshone words.
“The Ninumbee are still here with us. They were very powerful beings. They were only like three feet tall. And they live up in our mountains even today.”
Lovelace says the early amphibians’ burrowing habit gives researchers hope about a way for modern amphibians to survive climate change.
The Alutiiq Museum is currently under construction to expand its footprint near downtown Kodiak, April 8, 2024. (Photo: Brian Venua / KMXT)
The Alutiiq Museum has received a grant to revamp the Koniag Cultural Library.
The grant comes as it’s finishing construction on its new building.
As KMXT’s Brian Venua reports, staff say it’s good timing to have even more to show off at its grand reopening in May.
The Alutiiq Museum has been closed for over a year for an expansion to nearly double its size.
Museum officials plan to display more items from its collections as well as feature more art from contemporary culture bearers.
But now with this grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the museum will make it easier than ever to access its library, too.
“In the past, we had a library – I don’t think anyone knew that.”
That’s Amanda Lancaster, the museum’s curator of collections.
Since 2018, the library has served as the official tribal library of Koniag, Kodiak’s regional Native corporation.
It was in the basement, it was very inaccessible, you had to make an appointment, you had to have a staff member with you just because it was in the basement and sort of more of a staff space.
The library features thousands of printed materials, hundreds of audio/visual items, and well over 10,000 photos as part of the collection for people to research Alutiiq culture.
The new funding will help the museum pay for renovations for a more friendly library space.
Lancaster says they’re aiming to have matching shelving units, furniture for a seating area and computers for research.
Patrons won’t need appointments or staff supervision just to be in there – they’ll just need to check in and use the library at their leisure.
“We’re just hoping that it will make it much more accessible so that people will want to come and use it.”
While the new money won’t cover new acquisitions, it could make room for future donations.
“It’s going to be much larger and much more spacious and (have) space to sit and read.”
It’s also a reason to recatalog and reorganize all of those resources.
“I’m just really excited to have one sort of dedicated project where we make sure everything’s in the right space.”
After the renovations, the grant will also pay for an outreach effort to solicit comments on how to make the library as useful as possible.
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