OPA

When the fire started on June 11 at the Over the Rainbow housing subdivision located on the Fort Apache Reservation in central-eastern Arizona, the initial response to it was performed by the Fort Apache Bureau of Indian Affairs Fire Department. But the fire grew quickly and in minutes was beyond the capacity of local resources. The Bureau of Indian Affairs coordinated the effort to get other resources from the state of Arizona and the U.S. Fish and Game Department to combat the fire that was quickly threatening surrounding property. The fire, which was started by an unknown person that police continue to seek for questioning, burned for five days. By the time the fire was under control it had burned over 4,470 acres of desert foothills and forested mountains, causing the shutdown of electrical service to the reservation for a couple of days.

No fatalities were reported, but 17 homes and 13 out buildings were destroyed. The fire caused anxious feelings when the blaze spread to within a few hundred feet of the local Indian Health Service Hospital. 100 homes had to be evacuated with patients and residents being housed at the local high school dormitories. Also 240 families were displaced from their smoke and heat damaged homes.

The Fort Apache Tribal Council passed a resolution declaring the site a disaster area, opening the door for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to assist in the recovery effort. FEMA is onsite, working with Bureau and Tribal officials to assess the damage, thought to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, in personal property losses. The American Red Cross and other non-governmental agencies are also helping to provide food, shelter and clothing for those who need it. The problem is that FEMA assistance covers only the cost of dealing with the immediate needs of the individuals, there are other costs associated with the fire that will not be covered. The tribe with meager means, will have to try and make up the difference.

At the peak of the fire, the flames shot over 400 feet into the air and there were close to 800 people assigned to fight the fire of which 366 were Bureau of Indian Affairs employees and crews. The Bureau also supplied air tankers, helicopters, bulldozers and other logistical and communications equipment at various stages of the incident. The Bureau of Indian Affairs continues to assist the Fort Apache Tribal Government in their its to help their tribal members with putting their lives back together.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs Aberdeen, SD Area Office responded to the devastation caused by two tornadoes on June 4, 1999, that destroyed houses and other buildings on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Immediately after the disaster, BIA allocated Welfare Assistance and Emergency Assistance Funds to the Pine Ridge Agency to address the immediate need for food, shelter, and clothing, and assisted in the coordination of other emergency relief efforts. Mel Lone Hill, a former tribal vice president, praised the BIA personnel who worked many hours to bring relief to reservation. "All these people have done a heck of a job out there since day one." Hardest hit were the communities of Oglala and Igloo, where residents were treated to high winds and large hail that tore through the communities in southwestern South Dakota causing over $1 million dollars in damage. Over 150 residences are being temporarily housed at the old Pine Ridge High School dormitories while others crowd into already overcrowded homes of relatives. The BIA has so far allocated over $1 million dollars to assist in the relief and rebuilding efforts. But that may not be enough to rebuild the lives of the residents of Pine Ridge.

"Even in the best of times, there is a critical shortage of housing units available on the Pine Ridge Reservation, but losing over 160 homes can make an already unbearable situation much worse. Several families may have lived in the house, are now seeking other places to live where rental units are practically non-existent," said Robert Ecoffey, BIA superintendent, Pine Ridge Agency. Despite the extensive property damage, only one person was killed because of the tornado. Over 255 residents reported injuries and were treated at a makeshift hospital set up and manned by the Indian Health Service. "I want to commend the Agency Superintendent and his staff for the outstanding job of responding to the needs of the people," said Cora Jones, Aberdeen Area director. "I am also very happy with the support the Assistant Secretary Gover and Deputy Commissioner Manuel have shown in trying to help with this unfortunate situation."

In a major decision toward recovery, President Clinton declared the Pine Ridge Reservation a disaster area, opening the door for local residents to get emergency assistance from the federal government. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration is on site assisting local residents with funds for shelter, food, and clothing. The problem is, emergency relief is only available as a way to help the individuals get through the ordeal. The residents still have to confront the problem of what to do because many do not have private insurance to fully replace the housing unit they occupied. FEMA plans to move camper-type trailer onto sites to help relieve the problem of the housing shortage.

To assist in solving the housing shortage caused by the tornadoes, BIA moved to purchase 22 houses from the state of South Dakota that will pay for the relocation costs. But this is not going to solve the housing shortage problem for the people of the Pine Ridge Reservation, who face the challenge of rebuilding their lives. "The Aberdeen, SD Area Office has been authorized to purchase the 22 housing units that are built by state prisoners, the money has been allocated to get them going as soon as possible," said Cora Jones. "Can we afford more. I don't know, we'll have to wait and see what the other government agencies are going to provide in the effort to get these people back on their feet." Jones said. The houses, which were built by prisoners at the state penitentiary, are presently being moved to Pine Ridge, where they will be placed on concrete slabs or foundations.

Today in Billings, Montana the Bureau of Indian Affairs unveiled the Trust Assets Accounting Management System. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt hit the switch that officially started the pilot project of TAAMS. The program designed by the Trust management employees of the BIA and implemented by Applied Terra Vision, Artesia Systems Group, worked perfectly.

Secretary Babbitt, clearly impressed by the new Trust management tool, remarked, "This is the first step toward a trust management system that works for the Tribes and for the individuals across the Indian country." Babbitt praised the employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs as the creative force behind the system design. "I knew the people of the BIA would come through and they did. I knew they could do it."

The TAAMS system Will enable the Bureau of Indian Affairs to keep accurate Indian land records, distribute trust income to individuals, send notices to individuals regarding the leasing of their land, automatically record accounts receivable, certified title status reports, and a myriad of other functions.

Assistant Secretary Kevin Gover said, "This system is state of the art, and it has been designed by those who know exactly what the Trust Management System needs to do for Tribes and individuals." Gover gave credit to the Congressional appropriators for funding the system to Secretary Babbitt for his leadership, but mostly to the employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. "These people worked the long hours, and they have proven that given the resources, they can fix this system. The American Indian employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs are the true heroes of the day."

David Orr, President of Artesia System Group, the contractor for the system echoed that sentiment. "Our company implemented the system designed by the BIA employees. They are the experts on what this system should be, and they are the people who are making this system work. I have never se.en a group of people more committed to making a project work that the people of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, they have been a joy and an inspiration."

Gover went on to say, "Nobody want the Trust Fund Management system fixed more that the American Indians who make up the BIA. They know this system affects their tribes, their communities, and their families.

The TAAMS system will now undergo a 60-day series of tests and the testing of the application in every possible situation. Dom Nessi, the TAAMS project manager for the BIA stated, "We are now going to put this system through its paces. This system looks very good now, but our people are certain we can make it even better in the next two months. We are on the way to having the best land management system in the Nation." Because the TAAMS system is a modified Commercial Off the Shelf software system (COTS) changes and adaptations can be made quickly and easily. During the testing and data cleanup period in the Billings Area Office, if changes are necessary, they will be made to make the system work even better.

"This is a huge step toward creating the first working Trust Management System for Tribal and Individual accounts", stated Assistant Secretary Kevin Gover, "We did not break this system, but we are going to fix it. This is a case of Indians solving an Indian problem created by neglect."

Ten athletes from the Riverside Indian School, Anadarko, OK were chosen to participate in the 1999 World Summer Games, a sport festival organized by Special Olympics International taking place June 25, thru July 4, 1999. Riverside Indian School is a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding facility open nationally to American Indian children. These athletes, plus two coaches, qualified by competing in the Special Olympics Oklahoma 1997 Winter Sports Festival where they won the senior boys' level 3-basketball division. A lottery was conducted between the six states that make-up the Special Olympic Region Six for specific athletic events, with Oklahoma drawing the senior boys' basketball competition. Preparation for these athletes began in July 1998. Riverside Indian School's special education department initiated a special program with assistance from Special Olympics of Oklahoma. Some of the components of this program included the establishment of an adaptive physical education, period collaboration with residential staff programs, and coordination with Special Olympics organizations in Amarillo, Texas and Kansas City, Missouri for additional competition.

Riverside's athletes are designated as Team USA-Oklahoma. They are one of seven senior boys' basketball teams from the United States. Other teams competing are from the states of California, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, and West Virgina. Thirty-one nations from Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America are represented and will compete for gold, silver, and bronze medals. Riverside's athletes were part of a forty-three member group of athletes from Oklahoma that departed from Tulsa on June 25 as travelers in a special airlift program coordinated by Special Olympics frying on donated time by owners of private jet transportation. They are staying in Chapel Hill, NC and compete at sites in Durham, NC and Chapel Hill, including the Dean Smith Center on the University of North Carolina campus. Opening ceremonies began on the evening of June 26 in Raleigh, NC and the games will conclude on July 4.

Riverside's athletes are of Acoma Pueblo, Apache, Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Maricopa, Omaha, Sac and Fox, and Santo Domingo Pueblo descent.

Schools funded by the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs will receive a donation of $100,000 worth of computer hardware from Global Commercialization Foundation, a non-profit organization. The hardware will include routers, hubs, servers and other equipment needed to connect the schools to the Internet.

Global Commercialization Foundation was formed to develop financial and commercial infrastructure for American Indians using technology transfer, education and commercialization for sustainable growth in the global marketplace. Cabletron Systems of Herndon, VA, had donated the equipment to Global Commercialization Foundation. Cabletron is a $1.5 billion company that specializes in networking solutions.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs, Office of Indian Education Programs operates and funds 185 elementary and secondary schools for Native American children. These schools are located in 23 states, on 63 reservations. The Bureau of Indian Affairs will use the donated equipment to finish the wiring and connecting its 185 schools to the Internet. The donation will assist 84 of its most isolated and remote schools to reach the Internet.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs began its efforts to connect its schools in 1997 as part of a "reinvention laboratory" which aims to connect Bureau-funded schools in the most remote areas of the United States. The schools are located in areas where fewer than 48 percent of the communities have access to telephones according to a recent Department of Commerce report.

The donation will enable the Office of Indian Education Programs to meet President Clinton's challenge to connect every Bureau of Indian Affairs' school to the Internet by the Year 2000.

For more information, contact William Mehojah at 202-208-6175.

Department of Interior’s Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, Kevin Gover will be the keynote speaker at the 1999 American Indian Tourism Conference, "Preserving our Past Sharing Our Future" on Friday, August 20, 1999 in Albuquerque, NM.

"Tourism is the largest industry in the world, and tribes need to gain ownership of tourism in Indian Country", said Gover. "Tribes understand the tourist’s hunger for authentic travel experiences, factual knowledge about American Indian cultures and a more complete understanding of our collective heritage. American Indian people are the greatest asset in the development of tourism in Indian country. We have a new world/old world experience to offer tourists globally; our rich tradition in hospitality, our history and our values along with our inspiration and respect for our elders and ancestors".

Gover will address the importance of cooperation between tribal nations, local, state and federal governments along with the private sector to make it possible for successful tribal economic development. Tribes throughout the United States and Canada will be on hand to participate in this exciting event. Invitees include many Federal and State Government Agencies as well as private industry ready to partner with the Tribes.

Who: Mr. Kevin Gover, Assistant Secretary – Indian Affairs, Department of Interior

What: Keynote Address

Where: 1999 American Indian Tourism Conference "Preserving Our Past, Sharing Our Future" Albuquerque Convention Center – East Complex

When: 9:00a.m., Friday, August 19, 1999

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Kevin Gover will hold a media briefing on Thursday, September 9. Their briefing will focus on a new report documenting the management of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and other issues affecting the BIA budget.

The briefing will be held in Room 7000 of the Main Interior Building, 1849 C Street, NW, Washington, DC, it begins at 4:00 p.m. EST.

A phone bridge for use by out-of-town media will be available by prior arrangement with the BIA Office of Public Affairs at 202/219-4150 or either of the media contacts listed above.

"BIA is too often unfairly portrayed as a bloated bureaucracy, and in today's BIA that simply isn't true," Babbitt said. "This new report points out that a procession of Congressional budget cuts have inflicted serious damage to BIA's administrative structure. Clearly, it's a case of cutting the fat way into the bone. Now more funding is needed to create efficient management that can be responsive to the tribes."

Secretary Babbitt and Assistant Secretary Gover will also be discussing newly released figures on Tribal Priority Allocation funding.

Santa Clara Day School in the Pueblo of Santa Clara, New Mexico, will play host as the featured site in the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Net Day 1999. Santa Clara Day School and18 other BIA funded schools from eastern Maine to Washington's Olympic Peninsula will celebrate their accomplishments, as well as their connection to each other through the Internet, as part of the Four Directions Project.

The Four Directions Project was one of the first funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Technology Innovation Challenge Grants. The project was first funded in October 1995. Nineteen BIA-funded schools are included in the project. The schools and the grant administrators from the Department of Education at the Laguna Pueblo have been working with partners from the University of Texas, the University of New Mexico, the University of Kansas, and Haskell Indian Nations University, to integrate Native American culture and technology into classroom instruction.

On Net Day 1999, planned for September 25, Santa Clara will demonstrate how state of the art technology has transformed their school. During the day, visitors will see students and teachers use technology in their classrooms, collaborate with other students across the nation, and access resources around the world. The school principal, Frank Nordstrom, will show how he uses technology to improve communication with his teachers and parents through e-mail. The school librarian will demonstrate how to conduct online research using the Athena Library System. Kindergarten and second grade teachers will demonstrate how both teachers and students make powerful presentations of their work using Microsoft's PowerPoint software program. Another teacher, Arlene Romero, will show how students can use Quick Time Video Recording (QTVR) to communicate information about their local communities to others over the Internet.

Similar community sharing will simultaneously be conducted at each of the other eighteen Four Directions sites. At 11:00 a.m., Acting Director, Office of Indian Education Programs, Joe Christie, and Tribal Leaders from across the country will join an online chat to talk with students and answer questions from the other sites. Community feasts at each of the sites will follow the chats.

Net Day 1999 will be the Bureau of Indian Affairs' second celebration. The first celebration, in May 1998, celebrated the cabling and Internet connection of 28 schools in a 100-day period. The final Net Day Event will be conducted at the Havasupai School at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. That event, planned for the year 2000, will be a celebration of the completion of the Office of Indian Education Programs' Access Native America project to connect all 187 of its schools.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs received a prestigious Government Information Technology Agency Award from Government Computer News for the development of the Trust Assets Accounting Management System, or TAAMS. Government Computer News, a trade magazine for the Information Technology industry dealing with the United States Government issues awards annually for excellence in information resources management to federal agency organizations in the application of information technology to improve service delivery.

TAAMS has been at the center of a major overhaul of the Indian Trust System begun during the administration of Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt.

“I am extremely pleased the BIA has been recognized for excellence for the development and deployment of TAAMS,” stated Secretary Babbitt. “The Indian employees of the BIA want this trust system fixed, and this is an example of Indians fixing an Indian problem created by decades of neglect. I have always had faith in the abilities of the American Indian employees, and if they are given the resources to fix the trust system, it will be fixed.”

Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, Kevin Gover was also pleased with the recognition the award represents for the hard work done by the BIA employees. There has been a great deal of controversy surrounding the efforts at Trust reform, including the development of the TAAMS. “This award from Government Computer News shows our employees that their work is being recognized as excellent from an independent source. I want to thank our appropriators in both the Senate and House and the Secretary for pushing through the funding to fix this problem. It took 112 years to break this system, and it is not easy or cheap to fix it, but given the resources, our people are showing they will get the job done.”

The TAAMS development team went away from the traditional process of developing a government computing system. Instead of creating a system from the ground up, the strategy involved choosing a commercial off the shelf system, and then making the specific modifications necessary to meet the needs of the tribes and the 300,000 Individual Indian Money accountholders. With the help of the contractor, Applied Terravision, and the trust management employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a system has been created that will move the trust system into the 21st century. The pilot for the system is now operating in the BIA Rocky Mountain Region. The TAAMS system will be deployed to 220 sites over the next 18 months. BIA manages 170,000 individual tracts of land comprising 56 million acres. Management includes overseeing 100,000 leases for timber, coal, oil, gas, gravel, grazing and agricultural uses.

“We are literally taking this system into the 21st century”, said Gover. “The TAAMS system can be a system that all of Indian country can be proud of for a long time, and the credit should go to the hardworking employees of the BIA for moving heaven and earth to fix a problem that has been ignored for over a century. These employees are doing a great job at an incredibly difficult task.”

Other agencies recognized with awards from Government Computing News included the Department of Defense, NASA, the Defense Logistics Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the State Department, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

For Halloween, beyond increasing their presence on the streets during that holiday, law enforcement officers from the Crow Agency, Northern Cheyenne Agency, Wind River Agency and Spokane Agency went into schools to talk with children from kindergarten to sixth grade about safety when trick-or-treating. They distributed Halloween bags filled with candy, pencils, pens, rulers and crayons to each student. The officers at the Crow Agency and Northern Cheyenne Reservation sponsored a Spook House for the children of the community. "This is something new that the BIA Law Enforcement is doing, we haven't had this kind of involvement in the community in the past, we're trying more preventive measures," said Police Sargent Ben Snyder of the Wind River Police Department. "We're trying to get into more community involvement so that the public will view us as their friend, not their enemy," said Snyder. "The activities allows us to get into the community and find out things we normally don't find out." This involvement has led to the citizens in Wind River, Wyo. starting their own community watch program, with the assistance of the Police Department, to eliminate drugs and violence on their reservation.

Bureau of Indian Affairs law enforcement officers jobs may be dealing with lawbreakers, but their hearts deal with all the citizens of the communities they serve. Better policing doesn't always involve arresting someone, sometimes it means trying to build trust with the citizens of that community. In an effort to build a bridge, the BIA Police in District V, who uphold law and order for tribal nations in Montana, Wyoming and western Washington are already seeing the results of their actions. "Personal satisfaction comes from knowing you are helping someone in your community," said Snyder. "To see a smile on a kids face or an elder person is payback enough."

Because this is the beginning of the holiday season, other plans involve sponsoring bake sales and raffles, with the proceeds going toward providing holiday baskets for the elderly and needy of the community. Officers will be donating their time to go into schools and elders homes to serve holiday meals. BIA law enforcement personnel also are providing rifle safety courses, recording personal belongings for identification in case of theft, and working with tribal courts to update Tribal Codes for traffic safety.

The District V of the BIA Law Enforcement includes Crow Agency, Crow, Mont., Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Lame Deer, Mont., the Wind River Reservation, Wind River, Wyo., and Spokane Agency, Spokane, Wash.