Past News Items

Connecting Indian Country to broadband and energy transmission throughout reservations, pueblos, villages, and communities, is a priority of Indian Affairs. The digital divide in Indian Country will continue to grow, absent any federal assistance.

More than 700 Indian tribes, organizations and individuals have been invited to nominate individuals to serve as voting members on the Board of Trustees of the newly-established Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Culture and Arts Development, a successor to the current Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Harley D. Zephier has been appointed Area Director in the Bureau of Indian Affairs Aberdeen Area, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Morris Thompson announced today. The area includes South Dakota, North Dakota and Nebraska.

Zephier, who has been the Acting Director since last fall, was previously the Tribal Government and Indian Rights Officer and Tribal Operations Officer in the Area.

A member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe, Zephier is a 1962 graduate of Yankton State College in South Dakota. He majored in secondary and physical education.

The Department of the Interior is asking for public comments on proposed regulations containing additional criteria and requirements to be used in evaluating requests to take lands in trust for Indian tribes outside existing reservation boundaries.

The proposed rules were published in the July 15, 1991, edition of the Federal Register and comments must be received within 60 days.

The tribal plan for the distribution and use of more than $1.8 million awarded to the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians by the Indian Claims Commission was published in the Federal Register March 13.

The award represents payment for two tracts of land that were lost to the Band as a result of erroneous surveys of boundaries of the Red Lake Reservation in the periods 1883 to 1903 and 1885 to 1907.

Before payment of any judgment funds can be made, it is required that a plan for distribution and use of the funds be prepared and submitted to Congress for approval.

Interior's Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Eddie F. Brown is enlisting Indian tribal leaders and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) employees as part of an intensive program to combat the sexual abuse of Indian children.

Distribution plans for judgment funds awarded to three western Washington Indian tribal groups are being published in the Federal Register. The awards, made by the Indian Claims Commission, are for additional compensation for land taken as a result of the point Elliot Treaty of 1885.

The tribes involved are the Lummi, Lower Skagit, and Kikiallus.

The first meeting of the Presidential Commission on Indian Reservation Economies will be held 1n Washington, D. C. October 19-20, Co- Chairmen Robert Robertson and Ross Swimmer announce d today.

Louise Perkins, Tribal Government Worker, is Buried: Louise Gilbault Perkins, of Michigan Ottawa who worked 36 years with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, died November 22. Louise was administrative officer for the division of tribal government services. After attending Haskell Institute in 1941-42, Louise went to work for the BIA in Chicago as a Clerk-stenographer. She came to Washington in 1949 to work in the office of tribal relations under D'Arcy McNickle and has been since then part of the Washington scene for most tribal delegations.