The ACLU of Nebraska has joined a national brief filed in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court challenging a 1978 law passed by Congress aiming to stop harmful assimilation practices separating Native American children from their families and tribes.

Misty Flowers, executive director of the Nebraska Indian Child Welfare Coalition, said the Indian Child Welfare Act is still very much needed, in part to help kids maintain their cultural identities.

"We see a lot of times that those that don't have a strong cultural identity have higher rates of substance abuse, mental-health issues, suicide rates," Flowers pointed out. "It's kind of all connected with those assimilation policies and historical trauma."

The ACLU is urging the high court to uphold the constitutionality of the Act, which requires state courts to help keep Native families together. Before its passage, some 35% of Native children were being removed from their homes, from intact families, with 85% placed in non-Native homes.

A U.S. appeals court invalidated portions of the act in a Texas adoption case, for imposing duties on states.

The brief also calls on the Supreme Court to uphold the centuries-long legal precedent of tribal sovereignty, including tribes' right to preserve their unique cultural identities, raise their own children and govern themselves. Flowers explained when the U.S. government consults or does business with tribes, it is nation-to-nation.

"Because we are sovereign nations of this land. We were here first," Flowers asserted. "And we had the ability, and we still maintain the ability, to govern ourselves."

The Indian Child Welfare Act also establishes preferences for placing adopted Native children in Native homes. Flowers, quoting her social worker mother, said Native children will always find their way home.

"It's like an innate human need to have that connection with your family and your tribe," Flowers noted. "Especially when you look different than other people that are around you."

A bill to make tribal governments equal partners with the federal government in managing a pair of Arizona land preserves advanced in the U.S. House Wednesday.

The measure would establish the Great Bend of the Gila and Palo Verde National Conservation Areas, and designate a panel of 13 tribal governments to jointly manage the lands with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Much of the 400,000 acres is considered sacred and ancestral lands by Native Americans.

Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., the bill's sponsor, said he and others have been working on the plan for more than a decade.

"The bill would protect tens of thousands of acres of new conservation lands and wilderness across a landscape dotted with petroglyphs, ancient structures and settlements, and other cultural settlements and monuments," Grijalva outlined.

For the first time, tribal governments and the BLM would share responsibility for protecting the area, considered one of the most culturally significant and ecologically fragile landscapes in the U.S. If Congress approves "conservation" status, the areas would be permanently protected.

Tribal leaders say Native Americans have rarely had a voice in how their lands are managed, often watching careless development destroy iconic archaeological formations and ancestral monuments.

Stephen Roe Lewis, governor of the Gila River Indian Community, told subcommittee members in the past, tribal lands were often left unprotected against vandalism and destruction.

"Culturally significant places such as these deserve the highest protection," Lewis stressed. "If these areas are vandalized, if sacred places are disrupted, irreversible harm is caused because these areas cannot be replaced."

Skylar Begay, a tribal outreach fellow at Archaeology Southwest, said giving tribal leaders equal status over historic lands is long overdue.

"Allowing the indigenous peoples to access and use the land in traditional ways and be on equal levels with municipal, state, and federal governments will be a small step in righting the wrongs that indigenous peoples have endured," Begay contended.

Indigenous youths have been enlisted in the Southwest, including New Mexico, to help conserve natural and cultural resources on tribal lands as part of the Indian Youth Service Corps.

Authorized in 2019, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched the program over the summer with a goal of offering employment and training opportunities to Native American and Alaska Native youths.

According to Will Shafroth, president and CEO of the National Park Foundation, it's designed for young people seeking a path to good-paying jobs while working in a program that also tackles the climate crisis.

"To do projects in and around national parks that mostly have relevancy around the experience of tribes," said Shafroth. "And so it could be stewardship of the land by the tribes in the area that could specially connect tribal youths to their homelands in a lot of ways."

The Youth Corps' projects last from four to 12 weeks, and complement work of the nonprofit Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps in New Mexico and Arizona - which has included seed saving and trail maintenance, as well as contact tracing on reservations during the pandemic.

Eligible participants can be ages 16 to 30, and the majority of any corps must be Native American.

In New Mexico, youths have been recruited to work at White Sands National Park to assist with deferred trail, fence and landscape maintenance. They're also documenting archeological sites, and assisting with removal of invasive trees along the trails and public roads.

Shafroth said participants receive a mix of work experience, basic and life skills, education, training and mentoring.

"Some of this work is about teaching these young people skills - to operate a chainsaw, restore historic buildings, to do restoration work on sensitive habitat, things like that," said Shafroth. "But it's also about building leadership skills."

To establish the corps, the National Park Foundation has invested $1 million in the program - while the Interior Department has allocated nearly $3 million to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service and the Bureau of Reclamation.

The U.S. Interior Department has ordered name changes for nearly 650 sites on federal lands, in Utah and across the country, containing words considered sexist or racial slurs.

An agency task force conferred with dozens of federal agencies, 70 tribal governments, and took more than 1,000 public recommendations in developing the list.

Brad Parry, council member of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation and consultant for the Natural History Museum at the University of Utah, said for Native women, the change is long overdue.

"I think Native Americans see words like 'squaw,' 'papoose,' and 'buck' and some of those things as dehumanizing," Parry explained. "To take and say that a 'squaw' is a pan-ethnic term for all Indian women has been highly offensive to a lot of us."

The report found 50 sites within Utah with insulting names, including a spring near Provo which has been a traditional gathering place for the Shoshone. While the order only applies to federal properties, several states have recently passed or are considering legislation with similar goals.

In 2021, Interior Secretary Deb Halland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, ordered a review of geographical names of mountains, canyons, waterways and other features with the pejorative term "squaw" in their names.

Parry said Halland's move is rooted in a 2003 controversy to rename Arizona's Squaw Peak to honor Native American and Iraq War casualty Lori Ann Piestewa.

"I think Secretary Halland always had that in the back of her mind," Parry remarked. "And was able to get into a position where one at a time wasn't going to help. But doing them all at once, you're able to take one swipe and get everything changed."

Parry believes the order will go a long way toward changing attitudes.

"Removing that is assisting history," Parry contended. "These people weren't savages, they weren't dehumanized. You know, some of those things happened. But now, we can move forward and just say, 'Hey, our women are women, and they're equal, and they're important.' They don't have to go by a derogatory term."