Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte has signed a law that gives Native American families preference in fostering and adopting Native children involved with child protective services. The state protections come as the U.S. Supreme Court considers a case that could undercut a federal law providing similar protections. Gianforte signed the Montana Indian Child Welfare Act on Monday after it passed the Legislature by a wide margin. The measure is modeled after the federal Indian Child Welfare Act, which Congress passed in response to the alarming rate at which Native American and Alaskan Native children were taken from their homes and subjected to physical and emotional abuse.
As the federal government weighs greenlighting controversial mining projects in places Indigenous peoples consider sacred – including the proposed lithium mine at Thacker Pass in northern Nevada and the proposed copper mine at Oak Flat in Arizona – a group of Native law experts warns that Indigenous religious freedoms and access to these sites are increasingly under threat. “Court after court will say, ‘Even if this project would virtually destroy the Indian religion, that doesn’t stop the federal government from going through with the project,’” said Kristen Carpenter, the director of the American Indian Law Program at the University of Colorado. “So it’s really about power and domination more than it is a question about whether religion is really at stake.”
Those are your headlines at this hour. I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI News center.
