Mark Trahant is a writer, speaker and Twitter poet. He is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and lives in Fort Hall, Idaho. Trahant’s new book, “The Last Great Battle of the Indian Wars,” is the story of Sen. Henry Jackson and Forrest Gerard.

By any objective measure Barack Obama has been the most engaged and effective president on American Indian issues since at least since Richard Nixon. You could even make the case that Obama is better than Nixon because there has been so much successful legislation and Executive Branch action in less than two years.

A quick review of the Obama record:

• A summit with elected tribal leaders where the president and cabinet members held a town hall. Immediately after the meeting the Office of Management and Budget was charged with the task of improving the government-to-government consultation process;
• Enactment of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act as a permanent statue;
• A significant number of key appointments of Native Americans at the White House, cabinet agencies, even the Interior Department’s chief legal counsel;
• Increased budgets at the Indian Health Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs plus a sizeable slice – some $3 billion – of stimulus fund money that were directed at Indian Country.

I could go on and on with the real results from this administration. (If you need a contrast, remember the frozen glare of President Bush when I asked him about tribal sovereignty or what it was like when the entire budget for urban Indian health programs was to be “zeroed out.”)

As Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Larry EchoHawk said at Taos Pueblo this past weekend: The president has been communicating to Indian Country with his heart and soul. He quoted Candidate Obama saying: “I promise you, as long as I serve as President of the United States, you will not be forgotten.”

That promise has exceeded expectations. So with this kind of record you would think the election ahead would be exciting. Indian Country has a stake – a huge stake – in the success of President Obama and that means supporting and electing candidates that will back his agenda.

Indian Country ought to have the president’s back.

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Tags: Barack Obama, buffalo post, George Bush, Indian Country, Indigenous Democratic Network, INDN’s List, Larry Echohawk, Mark Trahant, Native American news, President Obama, Richard Nixon, The Last Great Battle of the Indian Wars, Trahant Reports

More than a century of confusion and disagreement over that most tension-producing of subjects in the West — water — came to an end yesterday when the Flathead Indian Irrigation Project was signed in Washington, D.C.

The agreement, between tribal and nontribal entities, is the first of its kind, and goes into effect tomorrow, Missoulian (Mont.) reporter Vince Devlin recounts here.

“This is truly a historic agreement we are signing today with our non-Indian neighbors,” says E.T. “Bud” Moran, chairman of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.”I am glad we decided a few years ago to resolve our differences through negotiation.”

Devlin writes:

The agreement creates the Flathead Indian Irrigation Project Cooperative Management Entity, or CME, which will have an equal number of representatives from the Flathead Joint Board of Control and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes….

The project, including rights-of-way and real property, will remain a federal project. It includes 17 major storage reservoirs, 1,300 miles of canals and laterals and more than 10,000 structures….

The Flathead Indian Irrigation project dates back more than a century, to 1908. Four years after it enacted the Flathead Allotment Act, Congress authorized construction of the irrigation project and directed the transfer of its management and operation to the owners of the lands being irrigated, when certain conditions and repayment of the debt of construction were met.

But the Joint Board of Control and the tribes never could agree as to what precisely was to be turned over.

Moran, Walt Schock, chairman of the Joint Board of Control, and Larry Echohawk, assistant secretary of the Interior and head of the BIA, signed the agreement at the Department of Interior yesterday.

Gwen Florio

Tags: buffalo post, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Flathead Indian Irrigation Project Cooperative Management Entity, Flathead Indian Reservation, Flathead Joint Board of Control, Gwen Florio, Larry Echohawk, Native American news, U.S. Interior Department, Water

Yesterday, we promised to post reaction to the White House Tribal Nations Conference. Here’s what we’ve got so far.

Actually, there’s nothing cautious at all about the group-hug assessment from Politico, the Web site about all things politics. “Native Americans embrace Obama,” Politio asserts here. But the piece doesn’t quote any reaction from tribal leaders.

RezNet.com, though, gets down to business with this piece by Victor Merina detailing a question about a possible apology to Native people. A number of administration officials responded to the question, none directly. The closest response was this from Larry EchoHawk, Larry Echo Hawk, assistant Interior Secretary for Indian Affairs, who said that “the best way to address the past is to honor treaty promises and respect sovereignty.” Nice – but not an apology.

Indian Country Today’s Rob Capriccioso gives a great overview, (here) of the day, from the morning’s love-fest, to the afternoon sessions when, as Capriccioso points out, “Tribal leaders also appeared to grow sharper as the day wore on.” Leaders such as James Ransom, chief of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Council, and Ned Norris Jr., chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, called for regularly scheduled regional meetings so that administration leaders could stay fully informed about tribes’ concerns, and the progress – or lack thereof – made inaddressing them.

The New York Times weighs in with this editorial, properly observing that “White House receptions of American Indian leaders have too often been patronizing historical footnotes.” The Times praises the president for “taking important first steps,” and also underscores the importance of federal recognition for at least some of the more than 80 tribes now seeking it, in what has been a lengthy, expensive and frustrating process.

In the Salt Lake Tribune, reporter Thomas Burr writes here of a question to Obama posed by Ben Shelly, vice president of the Navajo Nation. Shelly wondered if Obama could compel Congress to work with tribes in a way that continues even when the president’s term is up. Obama responded that he can’t force Congress to do anything but “to the extent that we can partner with Congress to lock some of those good habits in and end some of the bad habits that we’ve seen in the past, that’s something that we’ll be very interested in doing.”

If you’ve got 45 minutes, you can watch the president’s opening remarks on the video above – or at least sample it.

Gwen Florio

Tags: buffalo post, Federal recognition, Larry Echohawk, Native American news, Navajo Nation, President Barack Obama, Tohono O'odham, Tribal Nations Conference