140 tribal leaders testified in the Capitol

Pauly DenetclawICT

WASHINGTON — Council member Jill Sherman-Warne, Hoopa Valley Tribe, flew across the entire country to testify before the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies subcommittee under the House appropriations committee. She sat at a small conference table with members of the subcommittee in room 2008 at Rayburn House Office Building.

The room was packed with five rows of empty leather chairs. The audience was sparse on Tuesday, May 7, afternoon after a day of testimony.

Sherman-Warne was one of approximately 140 tribal leaders who gave public testimony to a House appropriations subcommittee about the needs of their community and what the funding priorities should be for Indian Country. Sherman-Warne and two other tribal leaders who testified talked about the needs for funding public safety and emergency services with an emphasis on wildfire firefighters.

She sat next to three others who are also from California tribes. Each one was given five minutes to give their testimony to two congressional members of the subcommittee.

“I think as Indian people, it’s really hard for us to advocate for ourselves what the real need is, because we don’t want to appear greedy,” Sherman-Warne told ICT. “So we don’t actually ask for what we really need. We are just asking to meet the minimum needs, and we need to be like everybody else, and go for the maximum.”

Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree agreed with Sherman-Warne.

“So, often people are just here saying we could live with the bare minimum, but what we really need is 25 more officers, but could you please just give us two more,” Pingree gave as an example. “I hope sometime we’re not in the position to just be looking at the bare minimum.”

The Hoopa Valley Tribe, located in northern California, funds their own law enforcement who are cross-deputized with the county police. Ultimately, the tribe has the only law enforcement agency and emergency services in northeastern Humboldt County, she said.

“We are providing those services to northeastern Humboldt County and we get no recognition for doing that,” Sherman-Warne said. “We get no money, no tax base, no money from the state or county to provide those services.”

California tribes are also concerned about the summer wildfires that are bound to happen again this year.

“Wildfire is a huge thing, and Congress hasn’t really talked about it, or I didn’t hear it mentioned today,” she said. “The National Interagency Fire Center, which is an interagency group, needs to have a tribal presence on it. So I would like to see a tribal presence on the National Interagency Fire Center.”

Chairwoman Charmaine McDarment, Tule River Indian Tribe, focused her testimony on getting funding for her tribe’s water settlement agreement, wildland firefighter services, and law enforcement.

“I would like the Appropriations Committee in Congress to know that we fund a lot of our critical infrastructure and public services for our tribe,” McDarment said. “In fulfilling the trust responsibility to us, Congress needs to appropriate more money to help us out with all these areas because our funding alone isn’t enough. It’s underfunded.

The impacts of underfunding on the Tule River Indian Tribe means not all of their citizens can live on their homelands because they don’t have the water infrastructure to support a larger population. The tribe has had to place a moratorium on land assignments because of the lack of water.

“We don’t have enough money to build our own reservoir and to build a delivery system to provide an adequate amount of water for our community’s needs,” McDarment said.

The tribe is located near the Sequoia National Forest in central California so wildfires are always a huge concern.

“In the more recent years, they’ve been catastrophic and they’ve burned with a higher intensity, especially because our reservation abuts Forest Service lands and they have different land management practices than we have,” she said. “When the fires break out on the Forest Service land and come over to our land, we have a small wildfire department and a structured fire department, but it’s nothing in comparison to fire to the U.S. Forest Service firefighting units.

“We don’t have enough firefighters to fight those fires, because we don’t have enough funding to get those extra hands and shovels on the ground.”

Catalina VillaMontes, Riverside-San Bernardino Indian Health board member, encouraged the subcommittee to move Indian Health Service funding from discretionary spending to mandatory funding. This move would ensure that IHS, like Social Security, Medicare and veterans benefits, are funded every year and wouldn’t be reduced unless passed by Congress. For IHS to become mandatory funding a bill would have to be passed by Congress that would mandate how much gets allocated to the health agency every year.

“We wouldn’t have to worry about maybe being funded, maybe not being funded,” VillaMontes said. “It would just be there every year. We could rely on it so we could serve our Native people.”

Currently, tribal leaders, advocates, nonprofit organizations and nations have to lobby every year to make sure that Indian Health Service gets funded and that the budget is not reduced. During lean years, it’s common for the IHS budget to be cut.

“The biggest need right now would be behavioral health services because of Covid,” she said. “The need for behavioral health has just gone up substantially. We are having such trouble retaining good counselors, psychiatrists, and there’s just burnout. This is across the country, but especially California and Indian Health.”

California is home to the highest number of Native Americans and Alaska Natives compared to any other state but there is not a single IHS health care facility in the state. According to the facilities map on the IHS website, there are three health facilities in the state, two are rehabilitation facilities, and one clinic for students at Sherman Indian Boarding School in Riverside, California.

There are 110 federally recognized tribes and over 660,000 Indigenous people live in the state. Indigenous nations that predate the state have to rely on purchased referred care funding to receive healthcare.

“We’ve been here since time immemorial and this is your federal obligation,” VillaMontes said. “Every one of these asks is a federal obligation. Please remember that and take it into consideration.”

The tribal leaders testified May 7 and 8. Readers can rewatch the testimonies on the House Appropriations Committee’s YouTube page.

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