On Sundays, Buffalo Post features a column by Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, who is the editor and publisher of Native Sun News. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard with the Class of 1990. His weekly column won the H. L. Mencken Award in 1985. His book Children Left Behind was awarded the Bronze Medal by Independent Book Publishers. He was the first Native American ever inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2007. He can be reached at editor@nsweekly.com

By Tim Giago

The ads are becoming more frequent and more vicious.

Kristi Noem, the Republican candidate for the lone House of Representatives seat in South Dakota, is the recipient of out-of-state advertisements that are using a scorched earth policy of attacking the incumbent Congress woman, Democratic Stephanie Herseth Sandlin.

The most effective way to combat horrible ads is for Herseth Sandlin to respond with ads that show her accomplishments, and she has many.

Her current ad showing how she has worked with military veterans in so many positive ways is a classic example. As the song goes, “You have to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.”

Herseth Sandlin is a Representative who has taken the time to learn about the Indian Nations in her state. She and current South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD) are probably two of the most knowledgeable members of Congress when it comes to Native American concerns and issues.

I have sat in and listened as both of these members of Congress answered questions, some quite hostile, about Indian issues, and they not only answered the questions, but turned the questions into a time to educate the questioner.

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Tags: buffalo post, John Thune, Kristi Noem, Native Sun News, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, Tea Party, Tim Giago, Tim Johnson, Tom Daschle, U.S. House of Representatives

Here’s the story by Matt Volz of the Associated Press:

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — The U.S. House of Representatives attached a $3.4 billion government settlement with Indian trust beneficiaries to a war-funding bill that it passed just before breaking for the July Fourth holiday.

The settlement was one of several additions made late Thursday to the $80 billion appropriations bill that includes funding for the troop surge in Afghanistan and money for federal disaster assistance. It authorizes the Obama administration to settle a class-action lawsuit with between 300,000 and 500,000 American Indians who claims the Interior Department mismanaged billions of dollars held in trust by the government.

The House originally authorized the settlement in May, but it was tucked into the Democrats’ jobs legislation that stalled in a Senate filibuster late last month.

The plaintiffs hope including the settlement in the war-funding and disaster-relief bill will mean the Senate will approve it.

“We expect that the Senate must give prompt and serious consideration to the bill because, without enactment, there are no funds for our war efforts and no funds for FEMA,” plaintiffs attorney Dennis Gingold said Friday. “The bill is too important to this country. Partisan politics must not obstruct passage.”

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Tags: Blackfeet, buffalo post, Cobell v. Salazar, Dennis Gingold, Elouise Cobell, Gwen Florio, Indian trust case, Native American news, Senate Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Interior Department, U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, U.S. Senate, U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, War-funding bill

Here’s the entire story from Matt Volz of the Associated Press:

HELENA – The federal judge who presided over a class-action lawsuit accusing the government of mismanaging Indian trust funds has retired before the Senate could vote on the $3.4 billion settlement negotiated after 14 years of litigation.

Judge James Robertson’s retirement as a senior judge in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., took effect on Tuesday, said Robertson’s secretary, Marlene Taylor. The judge is in his 70s.

Robertson oversaw the negotiations that led to the settlement between the Department of Interior and the plaintiffs – some 300,000 to 500,000 Indians who own property the government holds in trust for them.

The Department of Interior leases that land to others to farm or develop resources and by agreement is supposed to pay the Indians the money generated by the land into Individual Indian Money trust accounts, or IIMs. The plaintiffs claim the government mismanaged those trust accounts for more than a century.

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Tags: buffalo post, Cobell v. Salazar, Elouise Cobell, Gwen Florio, Indian Education Scholarship, Indian trust case, Individual Indian Money, Interior Department, Judge Royce Lamberth, Native American news, U.S. Court of Appeals, U.S. District Judge James Robertson, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate

Mark Trahant is a Kaiser Media Fellow examining the Indian Health Service and its relevance to the national health care reform debate. He is a member of Idaho’s Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. Comment here.

We’re still confused about the new health care insurance law. But there is this twist: More of us are starting to figure out what the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act means to our families.

The Kaiser Family Foundation reports in a May poll: “Confusion over the new health reform law declined but remains widespread, with 44 percent of the public saying they were confused in May, compared to 55 percent in April. Moreover, more than a third of Americans (35 percent) say they do not understand what the impact of the law will be on themselves and their families, while 61 percent report feeling they do understand what that impact will be.”

It’s also interesting to see how we are learning about this new law. “More than half report having gotten information from friends and family (68 percent), or from cable (63 percent) or broadcast news programs (55 percent). Further breaking down those getting health reform information from cable news, 25 percent of Americans indicated their main cable source on this topic was FOX News, 22 percent named CNN and 6 percent MSNBC. In fact, cable news still tops the list of the public’s “most important” sources of news about the new law, with 30 percent saying they rely on that source more than any other.”

If cable news is teaching America about health care reform, well, let’s just say, there will be a lot more to learn later.
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Tags: CNN, Fox News, Gwen Florio, Heatlh care reform, Indian Health Service, Internal Revenue Service, IRS, Kaiser Family Foundation, MSNBC, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, U.S. House of Representatives