Indian Country

(Runtime 4:02)More than 17 million acres in what is now Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana make up the historic homeland of the Nez Perce Tribe.A…

Deb Haaland, the former Democratic congresswoman, made history Monday by becoming the first indigenous interior secretary. She's promising to begin repairing a legacy of broken treaties and abuses committed by the federal government toward tribes. It's one pillar of a long and ambitious to-do list of reforms the administration is planning at the sprawling agency that is the federal government's most direct contact with the nation's 574 federally recognized — and sovereign — tribes.

A portion of the first coronavirus vaccines have been designated to go to Indian Country, but some tribes are skeptical about the federal government's ability to deliver and distribute the vaccines.

The first Native American woman elected to the Washington State House of Representatives says she is drafting legislation to retire Native-themed mascots and team names at public schools. This has been a goal of Native American leaders for a while, but has new-found momentum in the wake of the Washington, DC, NFL football team’s name change.

The Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Central Oregon has been without safe drinking water all summer. Some people don’t have running water at all. In May, a burst pipe led to a cascade of infrastructure failures. That leaves around 4,000 people improvising for an essential human need.

In his new book, Nick Estes points a way forward, with solidarity and without sentimentality, to an idea of Indigenous land alive with ancestry and renewal.

Author David Treuer calls his new book a "counternarrative" to Dee Brown's 1970 classic. "I have tried to catch us not in the act of dying but, rather, in the radical act of living," he writes.

The program covers a number of real-world situations: assisting with the registration of sex offenders; identifying human remains; locating endangered and missing people; arming tribal law enforcement with information about people they encounter in traffic stops; and conducting background checks to vet foster parents.