ST. PAUL, Minn. – The Minnesota Supreme Court heard arguments this week about a controversial name change involving a Minneapolis lake. The change was made to better reflect American Indian history, and one local historian says more of these actions can be expected.

The name change – from Lake Calhoun to its original Dakota name, Bde Maka Ska – is one of several recent examples of an iconic place or building considered for re-naming in honor of Native Americans. University of Minnesota history professor David Chang, who studies indigenous people, says getting influential leaders to listen has been a turning point.

"The drive originally comes from, and still foundationally comes from, the American Indian community,” says Chang. “But has been joined by many other folks who are very sympathetic to the goal of having names better reflect the land."

Following a petition, the state Department of Natural Resources last year decided on the name change.

Supporters of the change felt naming the lake for 1800s politician John C. Calhoun was offensive because of his policies towards American Indians. But a group opposed to the change says the agency overstepped its power, and is asking the court to intervene.

Chang says the decision in Minneapolis is significant because the lake is the largest in the city and has a notable legacy. On a national scale, he says efforts to rename Mount McKinley to Mount Denali – which trace back to the 1970s – eventually paid off and had a huge impact on the movement.

"And it took until 2015, but then, that did officially become renamed as Denali,” says Chang. “So, I would say that that is both literally and figuratively a high point in renaming."

There's also been a recent movement to rename a mountain inside Yellowstone National Park.

In Minnesota, the state historical society is seeking input on renaming Fort Snelling. And during the 2017 State Capitol renovation, some of the artwork depicting American Indians was updated.


get more stories like this via email

HELENA, Mont. - State legislatures across the country have passed laws criminalizing an essential part of civic participation in a democracy - protesting. According to one expert, these laws also could infringe on the religious rights of Native Americans.

A measure passed in Montana this year is designed to protect critical infrastructure, like oil pipelines.

Rosalyn LaPier - associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Montana - said if someone is convicted under this law, they could be fined up to $150,000 and spend 30 years in prison.

"What is different about the Montana law, and a few other laws," said LaPier, "is that the Montana law also includes people who assist protesters."

LaPier said many states have borrowed similar language to punish protesters and people who aid them.

She believes the laws are in response to protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, and to prevent actions like the Keystone XL pipeline protests, a project that was proposed to run through Montana.

LaPier said the people who gathered at Standing Rock saw themselves more as protectors of the land than protesters. She said Native Americans treat the land as sacred, and the places where these demonstrations take place are comparable to church.

"They're coming in and they're praying there," said LaPier. "They're coming in and they're blessing the place. They're coming in and they may be having a ritual or a ceremony there, and that is just in accordance with the tradition or the culture of that particular area."

The 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act allowed indigenous people to exercise their traditional religions, but LaPier noted the law often isn't held up in court.

She added laws that make it harder to protest also erode the American tradition of civil disobedience, which has been a tenet of the society since Boston Tea Party protesters broke the law at the country's founding.

"Today, with these anti-protesting laws, what we are saying is that civil disobedience is no longer something that we want to occur in the United States," said LaPier. "It's no longer a value that we hold in the United States."

Support for this reporting was provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

HELENA, Mont. - COVID-19 is underscoring the importance of ensuring that people's estates are in order, but estate planning can be be tricky for tribal members. That's why Montana Legal Services Association and the Indian Land Tenure Foundation have partnered to develop a do-it-yourself online form.

Many tribal members own land through a trust in which the legal title is held by the U.S. government.

But Kathryn Seaton - the tribal law practice group staff attorney with Montana Legal Services Association who heads the Indian Wills program - said over time, owners of these trust lands have grown into hundreds or thousands, making it hard to use the land.

She said the problem is that when people die without a will, the land is split evenly among heirs.

"It's important for tribal members to have wills," said Seaton, "so they can determine what happens with their tribal trust land and to ensure that it's going to go to who they want it to go to and to not continue to fractionate interests into smaller and smaller portions."

The "Indian Will-in-a-Box" is a free online form to help Native Americans draft their wills and determine what will happen to their estates.

Seaton said the program has come out at the perfect time, since services have moved online over the past year to prevent the spread of COVID-19. She said the form gives helpful information as folks fill it out.

"The form itself also provides little help pop-ups that give definitions so people can just go through, answer all the questions, review all of the information that's contained in the form and then get their document at the end," said Seaton. "It will create the document for them."

Seaton said remote services are hard to provide in tribal communities.

"There can be a lack of access to just simply broadband service or internet service or even phone service," said Seaton. "Access to computers, access to smartphones, etc. So that's always a barrier."

She said her organization is considering ways to bring internet access to these communities.

Seaton added that it's been hard to get documents remotely notarized because people often need a credit history for these services.

Montana Legal Services Association is a nonprofit that provides civil legal aid to low-income folks.

By Lindsay VanSomeren for Yes! Media. Broadcast version by Eric Tegethoff for Washington News Service reporting for the YES! Media-Public News Service Collaboration

Cameron Macias bent down to examine a small pile of sawdust-filled scat on the floor of the former Lake Mills on the Elwha River in the northwest corner of Washington state in 2016. It as a sign that beavers were moving into the area after a 100+ year absence . "There's very small dam-building activity in some of the side tributaries," says Macias, who was working at the time as a wildlife technician for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, of which she is a member. "It's kind of funny and ironic because of the dam removal," Macias says with a laugh.

The dams she's referring to-the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams-were removed in 2011 and 2014 respectively, and together they are considered the world's largest dam removal project to date. Many other tribes have looked to the success of the Elwha River dam removals in bringing down fish-blocking dams in their lands as well, including along the Snake River and the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.

Together, the country's 2 million dams block access to more than 600,000 miles of river for fish. And by 2030, the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that 80% of those dams will be beyond their 50-year lifespans. Given how obsolete and potentially dangerous this infrastructure will be, not to mention its negative effects on declining fish stocks, the best solution for many aging dams is to simply remove them. But bringing down a dam is a big job.

When the Elwha River dams fell, it was the culmination of many decades of successful partnerships among the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and dozens of other local and national organizations. Today, those partnerships continue to support the tribe in righting historic wrongs.

Righting Historic Wrongs

The Elwha Dam was built in 1910 to provide electricity to attract new settlers, in flagrant violation of a Washington state law that said dams must allow for fish passage. At the time, no one consulted the Lower Elwha Klallam people, whose culture rests on the salmon that would be blocked by the dams. "We had a few of the elders that even stood in the areas of the lower dam where they were starting to build to protest," says Frances Charles, the tribal chairwoman for the
Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe.

But the dam construction proceeded, and afterward, hatcheries were put in as a sort of life support to keep salmon populations afloat. Every year, the fish born in the hatcheries would try to return to the spawning grounds of their ancestors, banging their heads on the dam in a desperate attempt to get upstream.

"We ourselves felt like we were banging our heads against the concrete wall, no different than the salmon," Charles says.

Things changed in January 1986 when the tribe filed a motion to stop the relicensing of the dams, citing that the dam prevented them from exercising their treaty rights because it blocked fish passage.

"The tribe and [Olympic National] Park and the environmental interests said, 'You know, if you're going to license these things, you're going to provide fish passage,'" says Mike McHenry, the tribal fish biologist. Studies showed that building fish passages wouldn't effectively restore the salmon runs, so the decision was made to take down the dams. Still, it took an Act of Congress and $325 million to complete the job.

Congress laid out a monumental goal in the Elwha Act: nothing less than the "full restoration of the Elwha River ecosystem and native anadromous fisheries." In other words, reverting everything back to the way it would have been without the dams.

To do this restoration work, tribal biologists regularly team up with universities and nongovernmental organizations to apply for grants. For example, Macias-on a grant funded by the nongovernmental organization Panthera-is now working on her Ph.D. at the University of Idaho by studying cougars and bobcats in her tribal homeland. And the tribe counts many other
state, federal, and environmental groups as partners in monitoring the restoration of the Elwha.

To Charles, partnering with other groups makes sense in many ways. "[The dams are] not only
impacting you as a tribe, it impacts everybody that's around because they're a part of that just as
much."

The Power of Treaties

Ultimately, one of the most effective tools in taking down the dams was the Treaty of Point No Point. The ancestors of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe signed the treaty in 1855, ceding their lands to incoming settlers in return for "the right of taking fish at usual and accustomed grounds." In a 1974 Federal District Court case, Judge George Boldt ruled that Washington tribes were allowed half of all the harvestable salmon.

"That really empowered the tribes in Washington to become, essentially, a co-manager with the state," McHenry says. In essence, the ancestors of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe paid for their descendants to have harvestable fish today by ceding lands to settlers. Because the dams prevented that, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe had legal standing to bring down the dams.

There are almost 400 treaties between Indigenous tribes and the United States, each with different terms. This highlights a unique point for Indigenous people as land managers: No two tribes are the same. "I can't tell you how many times I've had a call where somebody wants the'Indigenous perspective.' It's not this 'one thing,'" says Julie Thorstenson, the executive director for the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society. "They're all different, but the number one thing that they have in common is that they're all underfunded."

Indeed, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe relies on grants for much of its work, both before the dams went down and afterward for things like protecting fish during the dam removals, revegetating the newly drained landscape, and monitoring for signs of plant, animal, and insect recolonization.

The National Park Service alone has provided the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe with nearly $3 million in funding over the past nine years to pay for the restoration work, with funding set to expire in 2022. But full recovery could take far longer, up to 30 years, according to a fish restoration plan developed by NOAA. "It would be really bad if funding just ended in 2023, and we are working to ensure that does not happen," McHenry wrote in an email.

Thorstenson says, "We hustle. I'm really always amazed at how innovative tribes are." At the same time, she says, "Grants don't promote capacity-building, and they don't promote self- governance, which is what tribes are really striving for."

Dam Removals Coast to Coast

The Penobscot Nation in what is now the state of Maine faced a similar dilemma starting in the 1880s: Three hydroelectric dams were blocking anadromous fish from getting back up the river.

"[We] had a little informal kind of contest going as to who is going to get their dams out first," says John Banks, the director of the Department of Natural Resources for Penobscot Nation. "And Elwha beat our tribe by one year because we had a delay," Banks says, laughing.

When the dam's owners came to Penobscot Nation in 1999 wanting to know what they'd need to get tribal support during the relicensing process, Banks was ready with an answer.

"Number one, the removal of main stem dams must be on the table for discussion. And number two, we're gonna bring our friends with us," he said. "Because we know all about divide and conquer, and it's not going to happen. We are going to work with these environmental groups."

Penobscot Nation formed a trust with other NGO partners to bought the dams. They took out two of the dams and preserved a third, around which they were able to build fish passage. The original dam's owners were able to ramp up production at other sites, and thus it was a win-win: the tribe got the fish back, and the hydroelectric production was maintained.

The Penobscot River Restoration Trust is considered extraordinarily successful, but Banks is also quick to highlight a frustration that many tribes share: Non-Tribal groups often don't understand issues of Tribal sovereignty, Federal Indian law, or overall tribal interests. "That was challenging from time to time, but we just kept looking for commonalities and not our differences," Banks says.

The Work of Restoration Continues

In the case of the Elwha, the tribe always had legal standing to challenge the dams. But it wasn't
until the tribe won over the public through outreach and education-such as the annual ceremony
of traveling in traditional canoes to visit different Nations around Puget Sound-that they
received enough public support to remove the dams and form fruitful new partnerships. "I really
feel that a lot of the outreach with Canoe Journeys has been real good medicine to draw in the
outside to really witness the cultural values of each Nation," Charles says.

Despite setbacks, the restoration has made great progress. Macias describes one of the first big
changes she noticed on the drained landscape back in 2016: "The entire lake bed at Lake Mills
was just covered in lupine, and lupine is so good for so many reasons. It's just beautiful. And it's
native," she says. "Now, [in 2021, the landscape] is so incredibly dense with willows and alders.
At this point, there are a bunch of conifers growing up among those different trees as well. And
so we're seeing plant succession," she says, referring to the healthy process of how plant
communities change over time after a disturbance.

That recovery applies to the salmon too: According to McHenry, the chinook, steelhead, and bull trout are all recolonizing well. Coho have been a bit slower, and the tribe is still waiting for chum and pink salmon to come back in good numbers. The tribe continues to work to improve the habitat for newly returning fish, such as by placing logs and boulders into the river to create pools where young fish can thrive. Kim Sager-Fradkin, the tribe's fish biologist, has measured how nutrients from the ocean are making their way into birds and river otters further upstream via the migration of salmon, in addition to measuring how wildlife are using the newly available
habitat.

Even though full recovery will take decades, Chairwoman Charles of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe isn't worried. Her biggest piece of advice to the other tribes working on dam removal and restoration is simple: "Don't give up." Administrations, political whims, and partnerships may change, but the people (and hopefully the salmon now, too) will always be there.

"It took 100 years for these dams to be taken out. And we've lost so many of our elders through the process," Charles says. "But we know that they're looking down upon us and really grinnin' for the pride that we could feel with everybody that was there from all ethics and all regions and all areas."

Lindsay VanSomeren wrote this article for YES! Magazine.


get more stories like this via email