The findings show the federal Indian boarding school system consisted of at least 408 federal schools across 37 states and roughly 53 different schools had been identified with marked or unmarked burial sites.
The languages, cultures and history of Native American tribes were “targeted for destruction” by federal Indian boarding schools, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said Wednesday, and some of the children who attended those schools never made it home.
A landmark report acknowledging the United States’ culpability in forcing Indigenous children into boarding schools—where an untold number died—should be considered only the “starting point” for helping Native families, said Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez.
Deb Haaland is pushing the U.S. government to reckon with its role in Native American boarding schools like no other Cabinet secretary could — backed by personal experience, a struggle with losing her own Native language and a broader community that has felt the devastating impacts.
Exhausted fire crews are hoping to catch a weather break soon from relentless wind as they try to contain a massive and growing wildfire in northern New Mexico that is on track to soon become the state’s largest in history.
Saving tree seedlings critical to restoring forests in the Southwest from the fires ripping through northern New Mexico took four trucks and three trailers—and two trips into a wildfire evacuation zone.
In Colorado, the three National Weather Service offices together issued 62 red-flag warnings, in April, the most since record-keeping began in 2006. The previous one-month record was 43.
Conservation groups are appealing a federal judge’s ruling that backed the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to approve a 3,500-well gas project near Pinedale, hoping to relitigate their argument that the agency disregarded how the gas field would impact the country’s first federally recognized migration corridor. They also contend that the project could eliminate a herd of pronghorn that dwells in Grand Teton National Park.
Democrats in Congress are hoping to overhaul the nation’s 150-year-old system for mining the elements needed for battery manufacturing, as high gas prices and Russia’s war in Ukraine underline the need to transition from oil and gas to renewable energy sources.
The working group stems from concerns the energy transition will result in more U.S. mining under the General Mining Act of 1872, the nation’s primary federal mining law, which critics say is too lax in protecting the environment and vulnerable communities.
The Biden administration has canceled one of the most high-profile oil and gas lease opportunities pending before the Interior Department. The decision, which halts the potential to drill for oil in over 1 million acres in the Cook Inlet in Alaska, comes at a challenging political moment, when gas prices are hitting painful new highs.
Wyoming wants the Ninth Circuit to reverse a judge’s order blocking development on federal oil and gas lease sales in the state, according to a notice filed in a Montana federal court.
The Forest Service supports the intent of the bill, which would enshrine roadless-area protections into law, but said it could create “misrepresentation and legal uncertainty” as written.
Seven different conservation groups have sent a letter of intent to sue the U.S. Forest Service for disregarding thousands of acres of grizzly habitat in order to allow more livestock grazing not far from Yellowstone National Park.
The BLM has acknowledged the horses were not vaccinated against the equine flu, as is procedure after mustangs are rounded up from public lands and contained in close quarters, but federal officials have yet to release details about why they were not.
Members of the House Natural Resources Committee want the Justice Department to investigate the former Interior Department secretary and campaign donations by an Arizona developer.
A year after the Wyoming Legislature saddled state land in Kelly with a $3.2 billion price tag, killing an effort to sell the 640-acre parcel to Grand Teton National Park, legislators are once again looking to play hardball in a bid to maximize revenue for Wyoming schools.
Kennecott’s refinery west of Salt Lake City has started producing the rare element tellurium, which is a critical component in photovoltaic solar panels. Kennecott is one of only two U.S. producers.
A federal investigation into whether China is getting around tariffs on solar panels has Colorado’s expanding solar energy industry warning of layoffs, soaring prices and lights out for new projects.
Talen said natural gas prices that prior to 2021 were more affordable than coal, coupled with cheaply priced renewable energy resources, had made the company’s seven coal-fired power plants unprofitable.
The Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project has secured up to C$10 billion ($7.7 billion) in private-sector financing, but it comes with a loan guarantee provided by the Canadian government.
Landing Locals’ business model is simple: It offers cash incentives of varying levels to short-term-rental owners to convert their properties into seasonal or long-term employee housing. Then the company facilitates an “Airbnb-like” online marketplace to connect long-term tenants to vacation properties and second homes that often sit empty for most, if not all, of the year.
With Spokane’s housing crisis at a peak, the idea that housing units that could be rented are, instead, being turned into ad-hoc hotel rooms can be a tough sell.
Some of the possible permit changes include requiring a short-term rental permit as opposed to a business license, an annual renewal, moving from property management to requiring permits for each unit, a revised fee schedule, and a new inspection process.
City hall was abuzz Tuesday night, May 10, as the Steamboat Springs City Council took feedback for a proposed zoning map regulating short-term rentals, and short-term rental owners came out in full force against the proposal.
On Wednesday the Summit County Council discussed drafting a new law that targets short-term rentals such as Airbnbs and VRBOs. Summit County leads the state, with 21.5% of total housing being short-term rentals, according to University of Utah research.
A new map shows the height of Earth’s forests, from stubby saplings to timbers towering more than 50 meters tall, across the entire land surface. It captures the legacy of checkerboard ownership patterns and logging in the Northwest.
The B.C. government has committed $15 million over the next three years through its CleanBC fund to fertilize 25,000 hectares of the province’s temperate rainforests with urea, a nitrogen fertilizer synthesized to mimic animal pee.
Over the course of more than 100 years beginning in the 1800s, hundreds of thousands of Native American children in the U.S. were removed from their families, placed in federal boarding schools and forced to abandon their Native languages and culture. One college in Colorado is now reckoning with that history. Hari Sreenivasan reports for our “Rethinking College” series.
The 2020 census missed nearly 1 of every 17 Native Americans who live on reservations, an undercount that could very well lead to insufficient federal funding for essential health, nutrition, and social programs in remote communities with high poverty rates and scarce access to services.
To better understand the exact outmigration of the juvenile fish in this study, a fraction are tagged with expensive (we’re talking hundreds of dollars per fish) acoustic tags that enable scientists to pick up their signal from hundreds of meters away.
A Montana State University student has found that bison occupied a large portion of North America beyond the Great Plains region at various points since the Last Glacial Maximum about 20,000 years ago. John Wendt, a doctoral student in the Department of Earth Sciences in MSU’s College of Letters and Sciences, published the research in a paper titled “Large-scale Climatic Drivers of Bison Distribution and Abundance in North America.”
The EPA has thwarted Montana lawmakers’ attempt to loosen water quality standards, telling the state that it acted out of turn by adopting a new regulatory framework without first obtaining federal approval.
A pioneering carbon capture company wants to take the climate change fight to northeastern Colorado by gathering 350,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year from ethanol fermentation at plants in Yuma and Sterling and injecting it into underground wells.
Rockies Today is edited by Matthew Frank, associate director of regional journalism at the O’Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana.
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