Past News Items

WASHINGTON –The Office of the First Lady’s Let’s Move! Initiative and four federal agencies today launched Let’s Move! in Indian Country (LMIC). LMIC is an initiative to support and advance the work that tribal leaders and community members are already doing to improve the health of American Indian and Alaska Native children. As a part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative, LMIC brings together federal agencies, communities, nonprofits, corporate partners and tribes to end the epidemic of childhood obesity in Indian Country within a generation.

William V. Battese, a member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Indian Tribe of Kansas, has been named Superintendent of the Anadarko Indian Agency in Oklahoma, the Bureau of Indian Affairs announced today. His appointment is effective July 3.

Battese has been, since 1974, Assistant Area Director for Administration in the BIA's Portland, Oregon office. He succeeds Stanley Speaks who is now the Area Director at Anadarko.

WASHINGTON – President Obama’s proposed fiscal year 2012 budget request for Indian Affairs, which includes the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE), is $2.5 billion – a $118.9 million decrease from the FY 2010 Enacted/FY 2011 Continuing Resolution (CR) levels. Included in the reduction are the elimination of a one-time increase in 2010 to forward fund tribal colleges ($50 million) and the completion of Public Safety and Justice construction projects ($47 million).

The final environmental impact statement on the proposed Navajo-El Paso/Consolidation Coal Lease and Mining Plan on the Navajo Reservation, San Juan County, New Mexico has been completed. Copies of the statement have been filed with the Council on Environmental Quality and a notice of availability published in the Federal Register by the Department of the Interior.

CORRECTED COPY 11/27

Washington, D.C. – The Department of the Interior today launched a new effort to develop a Department-wide policy on tribal consultation, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs Larry Echo Hawk announced today. The new consultation policy will be developed with input from the nation’s 564 federally recognized tribes.

The contributions of Dr. William J. Benham, Jr., to Indian education programs in the United States were cited in a ceremony in Washington, D.C. on March 23.

Benham, a Creek Indian from Holdenville, Oklahoma, is the director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Indian Education Resources Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Bismarck, N.D. – Surrounded by fourth through eighth grade students at the Theodore Jamerson Elementary School, who joined him in viewing President Obama’s address on the importance of learning to their future, Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs Larry Echo Hawk underscored the President’s message by relating to them the importance of education in his own life.

John Buffalohorn has been appointed Superintendent of the Northern Cheyenne Agency at Lame Dear, Montana, the Bureau of Indian Affairs announced today.

Buffalohorn, who is a full-blood member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, has been Superintendent of the BIA Fort Totten Agency in North Dakota.

An Army veteran, Buffalohorn, began his career with the BIA in 1954, at the Haskell Institute (now Haskell Indian Junior College). He has been stationed at agencies in Oklahoma, North Dakota and Montana.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today praised the U.S. Senate’s confirmation of Larry Echo Hawk, an enrolled member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma and the first American Indian in U.S. history elected as a state attorney general, to serve as the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs.

Commissioner of Indian Affairs Morris Thompson has changed the Bureau of Indian Affairs' service structure in the State of Nevada. Official notice of the changes is being published in the Federal Register.

Formerly served by a single agency office, the state will now have an Eastern Nevada Agency at Owyhee and a Western Nevada Agency at Stewart. This change was requested by Indian Tribal and community groups in Western Nevada. Splitting the state into two agency jurisdictions is expected to improve services.