Brian Lipscomb, the CEO of Energy Keepers, announced this week that that the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes would acquire Kerr Dam for $18.3 million – more than the $14.7 million the tribes wanted to pay, but more than $30 million less than what PPL Montana had sought (Photo by Tom Bauer/Missoulian).
Almost 40 years after starting the process to acquire Kerr Dam, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have almost reached the finish line.
And they’ll get there for a price that is tens of millions of dollars closer to what the tribes said it was worth than what PPL Montana wanted for it, the Missoulian reports.
The Flathead Indian Reservation tribes will become the first in the nation to own a major hydroelectric facility when they turn over $18.3 million. That’s the price set by the American Arbitration Association after weighing arguments from CSKT, which maintained the price should be $14.7 million, and PPL Montana, which said it should be nearly $50 million.
Extensive hearings on the price were held in January.
“This is a historic day for the Confederated Salish, Pend d’Oreille and Kootenai Tribes,” CSKT Chairman Ron Trahan said. “We’ve been working toward this for 40 years. It brings tears to my eyes, because it’s something we never quit on.”
The earliest the transfer of ownership can take place is Sept. 5, 2015.
New owners will mean a new name for the dam according to Brian Lipscomb, CEO of Energy Keepers, a federally chartered corporation wholly owned by the tribes. Completed in 1938, the dam was named after Frank Kerr, president of Montana Power Company at the time.
“We’ve been titled as visionary people, and it plays out,” council member Lloyd Irvine said at a press conference announcing the price. Acquisition of the dam “is one of the tools that ensures the future of our people.”
But another council member, Terry Pitts, urged caution.
“We should not be blinded by the bling,” Pitts said. “There will be a lot of issues that come with this. We need to be fully prepared.”
A construction crew in central Texas may have unearthed the remains of an ancient Indian cemetery. Earlier this week, human bones were discovered at the site of a future 225-home subdivision in Round Rock, about 100 miles northeast of San Antonio. Work was halted after the bones were discovered and the police were called in to investigate.
According to Associated Press, after examining photos of the bones, an FBI anthropologist said that they appeared to be the remains of a Native American. On Friday, Texas State University anthropologists were called to the site to excavate the area, which has long been a popular spot to search for Indian arrowheads.
Because the possible Native American remains were found on private land, the developers, KB Home, are responsible for preserving the site or hiring a professional archaeologist to remove and relocate the remains. Texas state law says that even a single body constitutes a cemetery and a qualified anthropologist must determine if there are other remains in the area.
“You get more than a couple and people start to go, ‘whoa,’” Mark Denton, with the Texas Historical Commission, told AP. “We better wait and back off. We have to figure how we can preserve and protect this area rather than remove all of them.”
Historically, central Texas was home to several Native American tribes, including the Tonkawa, Apache and Comanche. According to the Star-Telegram, if investigators can determine to which tribe the ancient remains belonged, they would contact any present-day members of the tribe so the remains could be handled according to that group’s customs.
The Arapaho and Shoshone tribes and the Department of the Interior, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Land Management, signed a memorandum of understanding Feb. 25 in Fort Washakie.
Through the MOU, the parties said they will engage in a cooperative environmental program to promote compliance on oil and gas properties by lessees and operators on the Wind River Indian Reservation.
“This MOU is a good opportunity for all of us to start fresh, to be on the same page and to work toward the same goals,” said BIA acting Rocky Mountain regional director Darryl LaCounte.
Specifically, the MOU outlines a process and timelines for the parties to:
– review all ongoing oil and gas operations on the reservation with tribal ownership interest to identify actual or potential adverse environmental effects;
– identify prospective sources of federal funding to the tribes to support monitoring, inspection and enforcement;
– develop an environmental plan for oil and gas operations; and
– formalize a structure for future communications between the parties regarding environmental concerns arising from oil and gas operations.
“We look forward to working collaboratively with the Arapaho and Shoshone tribes, as well as with the BIA, to manage oil and gas activities on the Wind River Indian Reservation,” said BLM Wyoming state director Don Simpson.
For more information, call BIA realty officer Marietta Shortbull at 332-4639 or BLM resource adviser Stuart Cerovski at 332-8400.
NORTH PLATTE, Neb. (AP) — The carcasses of dead bald and golden eagles found in Nebraska are collected and recycled for religious purposes.
The North Platte Telegraph reports (http://bit.ly/1nwRtQ2 ) the state is part of an unusual federal recycling program that provides parts of eagle carcasses to Native Americans who hold valid permits.
The feathers and other body parts of eagles are considered sacred by some Native Americans. But federal laws designed to protect the birds make it illegal for most people to possess any part of a golden or bald eagle.
Lauren Dinan with the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission says the state recently sent 37 eagles to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Eagle Repository in Commerce City, Colo.
MARTY, S.D. (AP) — As the Yankton Sioux transportation planner, Wesley Hare Jr. received reports of a dangerous intersection often used by tribal members.
Accidents and near-misses were occurring because of a blind spot near the junction of S.D. Highway 46 and a Bureau of Indian Affairs road leading to Marty, Hare said.
Hare contacted the South Dakota Department of Transportation about the problem.
“A (DOT) person was out there, and he observed for a week and saw the near misses,” the tribal planner said.
A road turnout was constructed for safety reasons, Hare said. “We have gotten a lot of feedback and good comments on it,” he added.
The Yankton Sioux isn’t the only tribe with such issues. Transportation needs remain a challenge for Indian Country. In order to share their experiences, nine tribes from across South Dakota have created the Tribal Transportation Safety Summit.
The Yankton Sioux Tribe recently hosted the fourth annual summit at Fort Randall Casino. The two-day meeting drew around 100 officials — double the first summit and the largest turnout in the event’s history, Hare said.
The nine tribes that took part were the Rosebud, Oglala, Crow Creek, Lower Brule, Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Flandreau, Sisseton-Wahpeton and Yankton.
The Yankton Sioux highway department not only cares for tribal roads but also partners with Charles Mix County and the state’s transportation department, he said. “As far as tribal roads, we have only 28 miles. But in conjunction with the county and state, we have maybe 1,200 miles,” he said.
During last month’s highway summit, Hare learned of the vast road miles that other tribes maintain.
“Marty to Greenwood is only six miles for us,” he said. “But communities (in other parts of South Dakota) may be 30 to 50 miles apart, and they have to take care of those long stretches.”
The Federal Highway Administration has encouraged these types of tribal conferences across the nation, according to June Hansen the tribal liaison of the state’s transportation department.
“During the annual meetings that SDDOT holds with each of the nine tribes, the topic of transportation safety and ideas to improve safety was a recurring theme,” she said. “The SDDOT was happy to partner with the nine tribes and a number of other agencies (on setting up the summit).”
Those agencies include the federal transportation agency’s South Dakota division office, Bureau of Indian Affairs, South Dakota Department of Public Safety and the Northern Plains Tribal Transportation Assistance Program.
“The real heart of each of these summits is the host tribe, and all the host tribes have done an outstanding job with each of the summits,” Hansen said. “That is especially true for Wesley Hare and his staff with the Yankton Sioux Tribe. They really outdid themselves with some truly unique and special events like the honoring of the YST Code Talkers from World Wars I and II.”
At last month’s summit, the tribes also talked about cooperation between their road and police departments to cut down on drunk driving and related fatalities.
The Yankton Sioux presentation was given by Hare and Louis Golus Jr., the road maintenance supervisor. Besides the Highway 46 turnout, Yankton Sioux Tribe successes include the installation of reflectors around Marty and the road leading to Greenwood.
Among other projects, the Yankton Sioux Tribe has worked with other entities on a Lake Andes walkway and welcome signs around Charles Mix County, acknowledging the Yankton Sioux traditional homeland.
In addition, the transit program, started in 2011, has grown rapidly, Hare said. The transit operates 18 hours daily, running a route of 16 stops. The tribe constructed 14 shelters for passenger waiting for rides.
Passengers rely on the transit for reaching destinations ranging from jobs and medical appointments to the Boys and Girls Club and Fort Randall Casino.
“Forty-five percent of our people don’t have any (personal) transportation at all,” he said. “The transit is a really growing program. The first year, during a month’s time, we had between 500 and 600 riders. Now, we are over 2,000 riders a month. It has just shot up.”
In his work with the federal government, Hare noted a shift from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to tribes. Tribes now take care of planning, hiring their own engineers and doing their own construction. In addition, funding goes directly to tribes rather than funneled through the bureau.
That isn’t to say the bureau and tribes have become disengaged, Hare said. “We keep in touch with the BIA in Aberdeen. We still use them for a lot of technical assistance,” he said.
Hare was elected chairman for the Northern Plains Tribal Technical Assistance Program, which serves 26 tribes. Adequate funding remains a concern at all levels, he said.
In that respect, the annual highway summits take on growing importance as tribes make the most of their resources, Hansen said.
“The networking between the various tribal agencies that work to improve transportation safety — whether they are from the engineering, education, enforcement or emergency services — has grown each year,” she said.
On Tuesday Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2015 budget request of $11.9 billion dollars for the Department of the interior. The 2015 budget request represents an increase of 2.4 percent from 2014 or $33.6 million dollars to support Indian country initiatives such as land and water conservation, strengthening tribal nation relations, renewable energy development and expanding employment opportunities for Native youth.
“The President’s balanced and responsible budget strategy supports the pivotal role this Department plays as a driver of jobs and economic activity in communities across the country,” said Jewell in a DOI release.
“The budget enables the Interior to carry out its important missions and contains key proposals to uphold our trust responsibilities to American Indians and Alaska Natives, provide a new approach for responsibly budgeting for wild land-fire-suppression needs, invest in climate resilience, and bolster our national parks and public lands in advance of the National Park Service’s 100th anniversary in 2016,” she said.
Jewell also stated that President Obama will continue to support full, permanent funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which she said was “one of the Nation’s most effective tools for expanding access for hunting and fishing, creating ball fields and other places for children to play and learn, and protecting Civil War battlefields.”
“We are very pleased to see the administration’s continuing commitment to Indian country in a time of tight budgetary constraints, said Bill Anoatubby, Governor of the Chickasaw Nation in an email to ICTMN. “We are hopeful that the proposed budget will have a positive impact on the lives of Native Americans.”
According to the DOI, funding from the U.S. Government to Indian country is not one-sided. The Interior’s programs and activities contributed an estimated $371 billion to the economy in 2012 and supported another estimated 2.3 million jobs in the U.S.
The DOI also stated that the Interiors programs continue to generate an excess of revenue for the American people monetarily above their annual appropriation. In 2015, the DOI estimates receipts of nearly copy4.9 billion. A portion of these funds will be shared with State and local governments for school funding, infrastructure improvements and water-conservation projects.
In the confines of the 2015 budget, the DOI also proposes revenue and savings legislation that is estimated to generate over $2.6 billion in the next 10 years.
Specific initiatives in the budget geared toward strengthening tribal nations include a $34 million dollar increase from 2014. These monies provide support to fund social services, economic development, sustainable stewardship of natural resources and community safety in Indian country.
The budget also includes directives to improve educational outcomes in Indian country by providing $79 million for elementary, secondary and post-secondary education programs. The increases are $46 million in 2015 to support the Bureau of Indian Education and its associated programs.
Improving and increasing access to health care in communities includes $4.6 billion for Indian Health Service (IHS) with an additional Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative that includes an additional $200 million for the construction of IHS health care facilities.
There will also be a $5.23 billion budget over the next 10 years to support the training of 13,000 new residents in a medical education program that incentivizes physician training; $3.95 billion will be budgeted over the next six years to scale up the National Health Services Corps to place 15,000 health care providers annually in the areas that need them most.
Additional budgeted monies include non-specified resources to support the Affordable Health Care act, $650 million for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Native American Housing Block Grant program, $395 million for Department of Justice (DOJ) public safety initiatives in Indian country and $352 million for Public Safety and Justice programs funded by the BIA.
Kevin Brown, who is chief of the Pamunkey Tribe in Virginia and stands on a promising threshold to become federally recognized by 2015, said he is encouraged by the budget increase as a recognition as to the importance of the viability of Indian country.
“All of this sounds promising as well as encouraging,” Brown said. “If I am not mistaken, I also believe there are line items in the BIA’s budget which allows for the allocation of funds of newly federally recognized tribes. I’d like to be able to secure some of that funding.
“All of my time has been volunteered, my assistant chief volunteers as well as my secretary. I’d like to get broadband, and have a computer for the tribal office to get connected to the world.”
Press release, National Congress of American Indians
Washington, DC – Today marks the one year anniversary of a great victory for tribal nations and Native women. On March 7, 2013, President Obama signed the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 (VAWA 2013). At the signing ceremony, the President underscored the “inherent right [of tribal governments] to protect their people.”
For the first time since the 1978 Oliphant decision, VAWA 2013 restored tribal authority to investigate, prosecute, convict, and sentence non-Indians who assault their Indian spouses or partners in Indian country. The law created a pilot project that enabled three tribes to begin exercising this authority last month.
Reflecting on the progress over the past year, NCAI President Brian Cladoosby remarked, “Today is a day to celebrate what we have achieved together and commit ourselves to ensure the ongoing success of this important law. It acknowledges that tribal nations are the best equipped to ensure public safety in our communities and provides the tools we need to protect Native women.”
“VAWA 2013 is a tremendous victory. I am grateful to those who have stepped up to take the lead in the implementation phase,” stated Terri Henry, Chairperson, Tribal Council of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and Co-Chair of the NCAI Task Force on Violence Against Women. “I want to congratulate the three tribes participating in the Pilot Project and remind everyone, we still have work to do.”
Juana Majel Dixon, Councilwoman, Pauma Band of Indians and Co-Chair of the NCAI Task Force on Violence Against Women added, “To all our Native sisters throughout Indian Country, we have given a decade of our lives’ work—and this could not have been done without all of you. We hold a sacred trust as sovereign Native women to our people.”
NCAI Executive Director, Jackie Pata added, “VAWA 2013 does not mark the end of our efforts to combat domestic violence in Indian Country, it is an important step along the way. Tribal nations remain steadfast In the important work of protecting our Native women and securing our communities.”
Youths’ suicides rattle Indian country: The silence that has shrouded suicide in Indian country is being pierced by growing alarm at the sheer numbers of young Native Americans taking their own lives — more than three times the national average, and up to 10 times the average on some reservations.
By Sari Horwitz, Washington Post
SACATON, ARIZ. The tamarisk tree down the dirt road from Tyler Owens’s house is the one where the teenage girl who lived across the road hanged herself. Don’t climb it, don’t touch it, admonished Owens’s grandmother when Tyler, now 18, was younger.
There are other taboo markers around the Gila River Indian reservation — eight young people committed suicide here over the course of a single year.
“We’re not really open to conversation about suicide,” Owens said. “It’s kind of like a private matter, a sensitive topic. If a suicide happens, you’re there for the family. Then after that, it’s kind of just, like, left alone.”
But the silence that has shrouded suicide in Indian country is being pierced by growing alarm at the sheer number of young Native Americans taking their own lives — more than three times the national average, and up to 10 times on some reservations.
A toxic collection of pathologies — poverty, unemployment, domestic violence, sexual assault, alcoholism and drug addiction — has seeped into the lives of young people among the nation’s 566 tribes. Reversing their crushing hopelessness, Indian experts say, is one of the biggest challenges for these communities.
“The circumstances are absolutely dire for Indian children,” said Theresa M. Pouley, the chief judge of the Tulalip Tribal Court in Washington state and a member of the Indian Law and Order Commission.
Pouley fluently recites statistics in a weary refrain: “One-quarter of Indian children live in poverty, versus 13 percent in the United States. They graduate high school at a rate 17 percent lower than the national average. Their substance-abuse rates are higher. They’re twice as likely as any other race to die before the age of 24. They have a 2.3 percent higher rate of exposure to trauma. They have two times the rate of abuse and neglect. Their experience with post-traumatic stress disorder rivals the rates of returning veterans from Afghanistan.”
In one of the broadest studies of its kind, the Justice Department recently created a national task force to examine the violence and its impact on American Indian and Alaska Native children, part of an effort to reduce the number of Native American youth in the criminal justice system. The level of suicide has startled some task force officials, who consider the epidemic another outcome of what they see as pervasive despair.
Last month, the task force held a hearing on the reservation of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in Scottsdale. During their visit, Associate Attorney General Tony West, the third-highest-ranking Justice Department official, and task force members drove to Sacaton, about 30 miles south of Phoenix, and met with Owens and 14 other teenagers.
“How many of you know a young person who has taken their life?” the task force’s co-chairman asked. All 15 raised their hands.
“That floored me,” West said.
A ‘trail of broken promises’
There is an image that Byron Dorgan, co-chairman of the task force and a former senator from North Dakota, can’t get out of his head. On the Spirit Lake Nation in North Dakota years ago, a 14-year-old girl named Avis Little Wind hanged herself after lying in bed in a fetal position for 90 days. Her death followed the suicides of her father and sister.
“She lay in bed for all that time, and nobody, not even her school, missed her,” said Dorgan, a Democrat who chaired the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. “Eventually she got out of bed and killed herself. Avis Little Wind died of suicide because mental-health treatment wasn’t available on that reservation.”
Indian youth suicide cannot be looked at in a historical vacuum, Dorgan said. The agony on reservations is directly tied to a “trail of broken promises to American Indians,” he said, noting treaties dating back to the 19th century that guaranteed but largely didn’t deliver health care, education and housing.
“The children bear the brunt of the misery,” Dorgan said, adding that tribal leaders are working hard to overcome the challenges. “But there is no sense of urgency by our country to do anything about it.”
At the first hearing of the Justice Department task force, in Bismarck, N.D., in December, Sarah Kastelic, deputy director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, used a phrase that comes up repeatedly in deliberations among experts: “historical trauma.”
Youth suicide was once virtually unheard of in Indian tribes. A system of child protection, sustained by tribal child-rearing practices and beliefs, flourished among Native Americans, and everyone in a community was responsible for the safeguarding of young people, Kastelic said.
“Child maltreatment was rarely a problem,” said Kastelic, a member of the native village of Ouzinkie in Alaska, “because of these traditional beliefs and a natural safety net.”
But these child-rearing practices were often lost as the federal government sought to assimilate native people and placed children — often against their parents’ wishes — in “boarding schools” that were designed to immerse Indian children in Euro-American culture.
In many cases, the schools, mostly located off reservations, were centers of widespread sexual, emotional and physical abuse. The transplantation of native children continued into the 1970s; there were 60,000 children in such schools in 1973 as the system was being wound down. They are the parents and grandparents of today’s teenagers.
Michelle Rivard-Parks, a University of North Dakota law professor who has spent 10 years working in Indian country as a prosecutor and tribal lawyer, said that the “aftermath of attempts to assimilate American and Alaska Natives remains ever present . . . and is visible in higher-than-average rates of suicide.”
The Justice Department task force is gathering data and will not offer its final recommendations to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on ways to mitigate violence and suicide until this fall. For now, West, Dorgan and other members are listening to tribal leaders and experts at hearings on reservations around the country.
“We know that the road to involvement in the juvenile justice system is often paved by experiences of victimization and trauma,” West said. “We have a lot of work to do. There are too many young people in Indian country who don’t see a future for themselves, who have lost all hope.”
The testimony West is hearing is sometimes bitter, and witnesses often come forward with great reluctance.
“It’s tough coming forward when you’re a victim,” said Deborah Parker, 43, the vice chair of the Tulalip Tribes in Washington state. “You have to relive what happened. . . . A reservation is like a small town, and you can face a backlash.”
Parker didn’t talk about her sexual abuse as a child until two years ago, when she publicly told of being repeatedly raped when she “was the size of a couch cushion.”
“A majority of our girls have struggled with sexual and domestic violence — not once but repeatedly,” said Parker, who has started a program to help young female survivors and try to prevent suicide. “One of my girls, Sophia, was murdered on my reservation by her partner. Another one of our young girls took her life.”
Stories of violence and abuse
Owens recalls how she used to climb the tamarisk tree with her cousin to look for the nests of mourning doves and pigeons — until the suicide of the 16-year-old girl. The next year, the girl’s distraught father hanged himself in the same tree.
“He was devastated and he was drinking, and he hung himself too,” Owens said.
She and a good friend, Richard Stone, recently talked about their broken families and their own histories with violence. When Owens was younger, her uncle physically abused her until her mother got a restraining order. Stone, 17, was beaten by his alcoholic mother.
“My mother hit me with anything she could find,” Stone said. “A TV antenna, a belt, the wooden end of a shovel.”
Social workers finally removed him and his brothers and sister from their home, and he was placed in a group home and then a foster home.
Both Owens and Stone dream about leaving “the rez.” Owens hopes to get an internship in Washington and have a career as a politician; Stone wants to someday be a counselor or a psychiatrist.
Owens sometimes rides her bike out into the alfalfa and cotton fields near Sacaton, the tiny town named after the coarse grasses that once grew on the Sonoran Desert land belonging to the Akimel O’Odham and Pee Posh tribes. She and her friends sing a peaceful, healing song she learned from the elders about a bluebird who flies west at night, blessing the sun and bringing on the moon and stars.
One recent evening, as the sun dipped below the Sierra Estrella mountains, the two made their way to Owens’s backyard. They climbed onto her trampoline and began jumping in the moonlight, giggling like teenagers anywhere in America.
But later this month on the reservation, they will take on an adult task. Owens, Stone and a group of other teenagers here will begin a two-day course on suicide prevention. A hospital intervention trainer will engage them in role-playing and teach them how to spot the danger signs.
“In Indian country, youths need to have somebody there for them,” Owens said. “I wish I had been that somebody for the girl in the tamarisk tree.”
On March 15, 2014 a very important vote will take place on the Deming, Washington Reservation of The Nooksack Indian Tribe. The Tribe has attempted a mass disenrollment of more than 300 enrolled tribal members. Represented by Gabe Galanda of Galanda Broadman, several lawsuits have been filed in tribal court and in federal court. Elections of the Tribal Council and its officers, however, could alter the balance of power and the attempted purge.
Galanda says that the elections are essentially a referendum on the disenrollment. “The results of the primary signaled that the current Council lacks a mandate for that mass disenrollment,” he says. “In the general election the Nooksack People, who have been silenced in all political forums for the last fourteen months, will rightfully have a say in the matter.”
In the case of most American Indian tribes, historically the tribes have had the power to determine tribal membership. For centuries tribes “banished” people as punishment for serious offenses. In recent years, however, a trend has been evident with tribes canceling membership, or “disenrolling” tribal members due to claims of inferior membership qualification.
While the most recent trend evidences the most cases arising in California, the practice is not exclusive to California and there are cases throughout the United States. Recent mass disenrollments are spreading along the West Coast to Washington and Oregon as well. Although there is no way to know exactly how many Indians have been disenrolled, the numbers are substantial. One activist group says at least 5,000 tribal members were disenrolled in California alone between 2000 and 2008.
Motivation for the disenrollment trend nationally is hotly debated. Some experts point to internal personal squabbles or political factional differences as the source of the trend. Others point to the simultaneous enrichment of tribes from casino gambling. Tribal governments universally deny that greed or power is motivating disenrollment, declaring that they are upholding membership rules established in valid internal constitutions. As proof, they say they are removing people with tangential connections to the tribe, who joined primarily for benefits, services, scholarships and in some instances monthly checks financed by the casino profits.
Galanda believes that the federal law, the Indian Civil Rights Act and the Tribe’s own Constitution guarantees the Nooksack 306 constitutional rights that have been violated and he’s hoping to convince the courts that he’s right. So far he has been unsuccessful in the tribal courts but neither Galanda nor his clients are giving up.
KNOXVILLE – Tennessee’s got a state bird, a state flower, a pair of state rocks and several state songs. So why not a state artifact?
That designation likely will soon go to an ancient figure at the University of Tennessee’s McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture.
The 700-year-old Native American sandstone statue is called “Sandy” by the museum and is often used as a symbol for the center. It’s an ancient sandstone figure of a kneeling, older man carved sometime between 1250 and 1350 AD. The 18-inch figure from prehistory’s Mississippian period likely represents a chief.
“Sandy” was found in a Wilson County farm field in 1939. It’s on exhibit as part of the McClung’s permanent exhibit, “Archaeology and the Native Peoples of Tennessee.”
A bill that would make Sandy the official state artifact passed the state Senate and House and awaits Gov. Bill Haslam’s signature. The bills were introduced by legislators at the request of the Tennessee Council for Professional Archaeology.
“Naming Sandy as an official Tennessee symbol acknowledges the state’s ancient past, and will encourage Tennesseans to learn more about and work to help preserve our shared history,” TCPA President Tanya Peres, a Middle Tennessee State University associate professor of anthropology, said in an announcement about the bill’s passing. “Listing Sandy as the state artifact also honors the legacy and accomplishments of Native Americans who lived in Tennessee for more than 10,000 years before the arrival of European settlers.”
“The McClung Museum is thrilled to receive this recognition of Sandy and our museum,” said McClung Director Jeff Chapman. “Sandy is such an important example of prehistoric Native American art, and we are proud to be the stewards of this piece of Tennessee history.”
