OPA

Award of a $685,435 contract for construction and conversion of educational facilities at Santa Fe, New Mexico, into an Indian arts school was announced today by the Department of the Interior.

The contract calls for the construction of a new academic building, an administrative building and a student center building. The present academic building will be remodeled into art studios and classrooms. In addition to the building construction, outside utilities will be improved, paved streets with curbs and gutters will be provided, and a chain link perimeter fence will be installed.

Students now attending the Santa Fe Boarding School will be transferred to other boarding schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The converted school at Santa Fe will be reserved exclusively for special art students of American Indian descent from throughout the United States.

The successful bidder was Pickens-Bond Construction Co., of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Six higher bids, ranging from $693,000 to $737,900 were received.

Commissioner of Indian Affairs Philleo Nash, accompanied by other Indian Bureau officials, will travel extensively through Indian areas of North Dakota in early May, and Minnesota in early June, to consult with Government officials and Indian leaders and visit with Indian families in their homes.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, May 8, and the following morning, Commissioner Nash, Miss Selene Gifford, Assistant Commissioner for Community Services; Area Director Martin N. B. Holm and other area officials will attend a meeting at Bismarck, N. Dak., with Governor William L. Guy and members of his legislative research committee on proposed Indian programs and policies.

On the evening of Wednesday, May 9, Commissioner Nash and Area Director Holm, will attend a mass meeting at Devils Lake, North Dakota, with the Devils Lake Sioux and Fort Totten Indians. In traveling to the meeting from Bismarck by automobile Wednesday afternoon, they will visit Indian homes enroute.

On the morning of Thursday, May la, the party will leave for Fort Berthold Reservation. They will travel by automobile from Rolla to the Turtle Mountain reservation at Belcourt, and will attend a mass meeting with the Turtle Mountain Indians until noon. During the afternoon they will visit Indian homes, and hold a mass meeting with the Indians upon arrival at New Town that evening.

Following a breakfast with the Fort Berthold tribal council on May 11, they will leave New Town for a mass meeting with the Indians of the Standing Rock reservation at Fort Yates.

In returning to Bismarck that evening they will visit with Indians in their homes.

On Monday, June 4, Commissioner Nash will leave for a tour of the reservations in Minnesota, which will culminate in a conference at Bemidji with interested State, county, municipal, and tribal officials at 2 p.m. on Sunday, June la, and will conclude his plans to visit all major Indian reservations in Minnesota.

On Tuesday, June 5, Commissioner Nash in company with Area Director James E. Hawkins and other area officials, will visit the Fond du Lac and Grand Portage reservations.

On the morning of Wednesday, June 6, they will visit Nett Lake and Leech Lake reservations.

Thursday, June 7, will be spent at the Red Lake Reservation.

On the morning of June 8 they will tour the White Earth Reservation. That afternoon Commissioner Nash will leave for Madison, Wisconsin.

On Saturday, June 9, he will meet at Madison with State officials regarding Indian problems in Wisconsin.

From Madison he will return to Bemidji for the meeting on Sunday, June 10.

Award of a $758,802 contract for construction of school facilities at Kaibeto, Arizona, on the Navajo Indian Reservation, was reported today by the Department of the Interior.

Facilities to be built under the contract include a two-classroom and multipurpose room addition to the existing school, a 128-pupil dormitory, five one-bedroom apartments, and a multistory building containing two-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments.

In addition, the existing kitchen-dining room will be remodeled, all utility systems will be expanded, and the streets, walks and play grounds will be improved. These facilities, when complete, will provide more adequate educational opportunity for the present enrollment and allow an increase of 82 pupils, beginners through the sixth grade.

The successful bidder was Lembke Construction Company of Albuquerque, New Mexico. No other bids were received.

Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall announced proposed rules today that would help several Pueblo Indian tribes in central New Mexico block up their land holdings and improve their livestock operations.

The new rules would carry out exchange provisions of a law passed last September. That law transferred 69,700 acres of the national land reserve to eight Pueblo Indian tribes in New Mexico.

The Indians have grazed livestock on the lands for the last two decades. The new rules would help the Pueblos consolidate the 69,700 acres into one management area by permitting the Bureau of Land Management to exchange public lands anywhere in New Mexico for non-Indian lands within the pueblo's management area.

The consolidation will take place in central New Mexico near Albuquerque. Benefitting from the consolidation will be the pueblos of Santa Ana, 2ia, Jemez, San Felipe, Cochiti, Isleta and San Ildefonso.

The Bureau of Land Management will exchange lands from the national land reserve outside the consolidation area for inho1dings now belonging to others. BLM is also authorized by the act to use tribal lands for exchange with inho1ders, subject to approval of tribal councils.

The text of the proposed amendments to 43 CFR, Part 149 will be published in the Federal Register. The Department is providing the public 30 days in which to comment on the proposal. Written comments should be sent to the Director, Bureau 0.1. Land Management Department of the Interior, Washington 25, D. C.

The Department of the Interior announced today that a contract for sawmill equipment for the Red Lake Indian Mills, Redby, Minnesota will be awarded to the Mater Division of the Appleton Machine Company, Appleton, Wisconsin.

The decision to award the contract on the basis of installation of the equipment by the manufacturer was determined to be in the best interest of the Federal Government and the Red Lake Indians. The contractor becomes responsible for correcting any operating difficulties resulting from improper installation.

The new equipment, which will be of the most modern and efficient type, will replace an obsolete tribal sawmill that has been operating on the reservation almost continuously since 1925. Over the period of 37 years it provided the Red Lake Tribe with a total operating profit and stumpage value of about $3.3 million. The average annual employment was 283, mainly Indian employees, and the average annual wage was $136,000.

Only two bids were received for furnishing and installing the equipment on which bids had been solicited. The Meter Division of the Appleton Machine Company was low bidder with a bid of $147,315. The other bid in the amount of $148,339 was submitted by the Northeast Ohio Machine Builders, Inc. of Columbiana, Ohio.

The Navajo Indian Irrigation Project and the initial stage of the San Juan-Chama Reclamation Project, authorized in a bill passed by the Congress and signed into law by the President, will provide economic assistance to the Navajo Indians and will enable New Mexico to put to use a major portion of the water of the Upper Colorado River system to which it is entitled under two interstate compacts.

The authorizing legislation (S.107) provides that the two projects will be constructed, operated and maintained as participating projects of the five-State Colorado River Storage Project, now under construction in the Mountain West.

"I am extremely pleased that the bureaus of the Department of the Interior can now get moving on the construction of these very worthwhile resource development projects," said Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall. "Both projects provide opportunity for a resource program investment today that will return manifold dividends in the future years. The developments not only fit the pattern for wise and beneficial development of natural resources, as laid down by President Kennedy in his conservation messages to the Congress, but they also will provide economic opportunity for depressed areas,"

Secretary Udall, a native of the neighboring State of Arizona, indicated that he was especially pleased at the prospects of building facilities to deliver a dependable supply of irrigation water to the Navajo tribal lands in New Mexico,

"For many years the Federal Government has been trying to cope with the problem of bettering the economic conditions of the rapidly-increasing Navajo population, now numbering about 85,000," he said. “The Navajo Indian Irrigation Project contemplates the construction of distribution facilities to deliver water to approximately 110,000 acres of land within and adjacent to the Navajo Indian Reservation. The lands involved are located in two large areas on an elevated plain south of the San Juan River in San Juan County. An average of 508,000 acre-feet of water would be diverted annually from the San Juan River at the Navajo Dam and Reservoir, now nearing completion by the Bureau of Reclamation at a site on the San Juan River and would be conveyed some 150 miles across reservation lands.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs estimated that some 14 years will be required to complete planning on the $135 million project and to complete the canals and laterals, tunnels, siphons, and pumping plants required. Delivery of water to the first of the project lands, however, could be accomplished within five years. The project is planned to supply irrigation water but is adaptable to serve municipal and industrial water users if the need arises in the future.

The initial stage development of the Bureau of Reclamation's San Juan-Chama Project contemplates an average annual diversion of about 110,000 acre-feet from the upper tributaries of the San Juan River for utilization in the Rio Grande Basin in New Mexico. The $86 million project would provide needed municipal and industrial water for the city of Albuquerque and also would yield a full and supplemental irrigation water supply for about 120,000 acres of farming land in the Rio Grande Basin in New Mexico.

Recreation and the conservation and development of fish and wildlife resources which would be built over a period of about 5 years also would be purposes of the San Juan-Chama Project.

James F. Canan, career employee of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, will take over as new area director for the Bureau at Billings, Montana, June 24, the Department of the Interior announced today.

Canan has been assistant area director in charge of resources at Gallup, New Mexico, since last December. At Billings he succeeds Percy E. Melis who retired last March.

A native of Altoona, Pa., and graduate of Haverford College, Canan joined the Department of the Interior in 1949 as a confidential assistant in the office of the Assistant Secretary for Water and Power. In 1950, he transferred to the Washington office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and served there for four years as a business economist. In 1954, he moved to the area office at Gallup as an administrative assistant and two years later was appointed superintendent of the Consolidated Ute Agency, Ignacio, Colo. After four years in this post, he moved back to the Gallup office as assistant area director six months ago.

In addition to acquiring a bachelor's degree at Haverford, Canan also attended Swarthmore College and Villanova College under the Navy V-12 program during World War II. He is married and has three children. At Billings he will have charge of all Indian Bureau operations in Montana and Wyoming.

Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall and Alaska's Governor William A. Egan today Jointly announced plans for a three-man task force to visit native villages in Alaska and study Indian Bureau operations there during June.

Named as chairman of the group was W. W. Keeler, Bartlesville, Okla., oil company executive and Principal Chief of the Cherokee tribal organization, who headed a similar task force that studied Bureau of Indian Affairs operations in other States during the spring of 1961. The other members are Hugh J. Wade, Secretary of State for Alaska, and James E. Officer, Associate Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who served with Chairman Keeler on the earlier task force. Robert L. Bennett, the Bureau's Area Director at Juneau, and Burke Riley, chairman of the Interior Department's Alaska Field Committee, will accompany the task force members on their Alaskan travels.

The Alaska study, Secretary Udall explained, is in a sense a continuation of the earlier task force's examination of Bureau policies and operations. It will be concerned with such matters as native land rights, problems of native fisheries in the southeastern part of the State, educational needs of the natives, and many other related topics.

The itinerary of the task force has not yet been determined in full detail. Present plans, however, call for a series of meetings with the native people starting at Anchorage on June 11. Subsequent meetings are scheduled to be held over a period of three weeks at Bethel, Unalakleet, Nome, Kotzebue, Point Hope, Barrow, Fort Yukon, Fairbanks, Juneau and Ketchikan.

A special exhibit, "Indian Handicraft, the True and the False," has been arranged in the Department of the Interior Museum at Washington, D. C., and will be displayed for two months.

Material for the exhibit was furnished by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board of the Department of the Interior and consists of Indian handicraft of all types, from jewelry to Indian dolls.

With the increasing demand for Indian handicraft, the manufacture and sale of imitations has become a huge industry, dwarfing the volume of sale of the genuine product. Products from foreign countries also have entered the market. Confusion has mounted in the minds of the public interested in Indian products and difficulty is frequently experienced in detecting the true from the false.

The exhibit will contain both the genuine and the imitation products and will help guide potential buyers. Literature to aid in differentiating between the two will be available during the display

Award of a $1,121,000 contract for the construction of new school facilities on the Navajo Indian Reservation at Rock Point, Arizona was announced today by the Department of the Interior.

The contract calls for the construction of a 7-classroom academic building with multipurpose room and administrative unit, a 192-pupil dormitory, a kitchen and dining hall, and other related facilities. The construction, when completed, will replace the old stone 2-classroom school building and two temporary classrooms and will allow an additional 120 pupils to be enrolled.

The successful bidder was Jen-Mar Construction Co., of San Diego, California. Seven higher bids, ranging from $1,129,199 to $1,377,000, were received.