Interior Secretary Deb Haaland hears from Indian boarding school survivors in Arizona. Tribal Members in that state delivered powerful stories Friday during the latest stop on the “Road to Healing Tour,” created by the U.S. Interior Department to create a record of the worst abuses in the 367 boarding schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and later the Bureau of Indian Education. The series of listening sessions, headed by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, is part of a larger initiative to examine the troubled legacy of federal boarding schools and the policies that led to them.
Members of the Rosebud Reservation face a number of barriers to wealth-building. For one, there has historically been a lack of access to banks on reservations. Many traditional financial institutions outside of the reservations are unwilling to navigate the technical aspects of owning a home on trust land. To add to the difficulty, there’s also inadequate housing stock on Rosebud Reservation. To address the problem, five Community Development Funds located on Rosebud and Pine Ridge have joined forces to launch the Rosebud Homeownership and Wealth Building Initiative. With funding from NeighborWorks America, the initiative focuses on increasing knowledge of the home-buying process and how to prepare for it in underbanked and underdeveloped communities on the Rosebud Reservation.
Those are your headlines at this hour. I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI News center.