The Daily Spark

Native people around the globe care for immense amounts of sensitive, biodiverse habitat. Many of these areas store carbon that won’t be able to be remediated once it’s emitted into the atmosphere. Despite protecting these critical resources, Native communities and organizations receive a sliver of all global development funding for local capacity and climate resilience. 

According to the World Economic Forum, just 0.82% of development investment worldwide went to Indigenous people in 2023. And a mere 0.04% gave Indigenous organizations the chance to determine how funds were spent. 

Industries that take advantage of natural resources — mining, agriculture and timber — receive trillions every year in funding for industrial transitions aimed at combatting climate change. From 2024 to 2025, funding for clean energy efforts in these industries jumped 8%.

Community development financial institutions provide critical avenues for funding in rural and underserved communities where traditional banks have been more hesitant to invest. Armed with $6.2 million in new U.S. Department of Agriculture funding, six Native community development financial institutions will now have the ability to support tribal housing across Indian Country.

According to Tribal Business News, 43 home purchase loans and 25 home repair loans are expected to boost housing through the Chehalis Tribal Loan Fund in Washington State, the Haa Yakaawu Financial Corporation in Alaska, Lakota Funds in South Dakota, Lake Superior Community Development Corp. in Michigan, the Nimiipuu Community Development Fund in Idaho and the San Carlos Apache Tribe Relending Program in Arizona.

Monday is the final day for the public to issue comments on a proposal to remove questions about race and ethnicity from the U.S. census.

Tribal leaders are concerned that the proposal process is rushed and being done without proper tribal consultation. The matter was posted to the Federal Register on Sept. 10. In October, the National Congress of American Indians convened more than 500 tribal leaders over Zoom to meet with U.S. Census officials. During the meeting, tribal leaders stated their concerns and offered to extend the discussion into 2027. 

Tribes said census numbers are vital to determining how much federal money they receive for housing, education and health care services. Census officials argue that the rule change would still count tribal enrollment, proposing that the federal government would use internal data from tribal nations to get the most accurate count.

On Oct. 29, NCAI executive director Larry Wright Jr. sent a letter to census officials outlining the reasons tribes reject the rule change. He said that data collection from other agencies would increase inaccurate counts of Native people in the census and drastically alter Congressional appropriations to tribes. 

“Such changes undermine longstanding federal obligations arising from the United States’ trust responsibility to Tribal Nations,” Wright wrote.

Comments can be submitted at Regulations.gov under docket number USBC-2026-0628.

A free two-day event Nov. 2 and 3 at the Hardin Family Engagement Center near the Crow Reservation in Montana will enable participants to help community members experiencing mental health challenges. 

Instructor Jerry Girard, a consultant and educator, will train people who don’t have medical experience to recognize risks for suicide, use evidence-backed strategies to connect someone struggling with appropriate resources and guide skill-building in practices like listening without judgment. 

Likening the training to CPR for physical distress, Girard offers an accessible entry point into developing the abilities to render potentially life-saving support for a broad range of challenges.

Across North Dakota and Montana, the Buffalo Nations Grasslands Alliance is meeting tribal leaders this week as part of its regionwide efforts to foster environmental stewardship and cultural preservation. 

Members of the Native-led organization’s team embarked on their annual tour Wednesday, Oct. 28, with a stop to visit the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Other planned stops include visiting with the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and the Crow Tribe. 

The alliance is dedicated to bringing Native Nations together in conservation throughout the Northern Great Plains, and the current weeklong tour will inform the alliance’s ability to support Indigenous-led stewardship and collaboration.

At 18 years old, Homer Courville rushed into wildland firefighting in Montana and began a career as a smokejumper, leaping from planes into active fires in remote mountains.

Courville, a citizen of the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes, received the Forestry Pioneer Award from the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, a lifetime achievement award that honors prominent people in Montana’s forestry history.

During a ceremony on Oct. 22, Courville was praised as a legend in wildland firefighting and for helping to expand the Montana Indian Firefighters Program.

"My interest and gratification with the fire program was seeing these younger people grow and become good firefighters and fire staff," Courville said in a speech after receiving the honor, which includes a permanent engraving of him inside the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation offices. The engraving celebrates his 32 years in the field.

Youth protesters hit the streets to stand against a federal reform bill that could dramatically impact how the federal government approves permits for development projects on public lands. 

According to Source New Mexico, students from the New Mexico School for the Arts in Santa Fe and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque walked out of class to protest the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, co-sponsored by Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM).

Opponents of the bill include tribal leaders from across the United States who see reform to tribal consultation in the measure as anti-sovereignty and potentially “termintation-like.”  

Heinrich’s office told Source New Mexico that the bill would have accountability measures for data centers. 

“The legislation also defends against the Trump administration’s efforts to make all Tribal consultation discretionary and eliminate consultation altogether on cultural landscapes,” Heinrich spokesperson Luis Soriano was quoted as saying.

Dolores Huerta, a civil rights leader who rose to prominence in the 1950s as a co-founder of the United Farm Workers union, has died. She passed away in her home on Wednesday, according to a statement issued by her family. She was 96.

Her work is widely known to have supported Chicano rights. Her rallying cry, “Si se puede,” became an international motto for working class people and was at the foundation in 2008 for Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” messaging.

Huerta was born in New Mexico and became a resident of California. There she started the Dolores Huerta Foundation and created a hub to address racial issues, poverty and LGBTQ+ and workers’ rights. She traveled the world forging solidarity on these issues. 

She also called for greater solidarity with Native Americans, encouraging people, through her blunt observations, to speak honestly about the United States’ role in Indigenous suffering. 

In 2018, she traveled the country, making stops at colleges and universities to warn of historical revisionism that seeks to eliminate the impact that slavery had on Black and Native Americans.

“Native Americans were the first slaves,” she told ABC57 after meeting with students at Notre Dame. “African slaves built the White House, it was the people from Mexico and Asia that came and built the infrastructure of this country. If we don’t erase the ignorance, it’s devastation for the country and the world.”

In 2021, Huerta told KOAT News that a DNA test offered her insight into her Pueblo heritage. “I found out that I have a great, great, great 14th generation grandmother named Ines, who was a Pueblo Indian, you know, and that fills me with so much pride.”

As part of ongoing efforts to preserve the traditional language and culture of the tribes headquartered on Montana’s Flathead Reservation, the Salish-Qlispe Culture Committee revealed a new partnership with Apple in October to debut a Salish language keyboard on various devices. As long as users are running iOS 27, they can now access a free Salish alphabet and toggle between English and Salish typing options seamlessly. 

The committee that works with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Ronan and the surrounding Mission Valley offers various language resources in addition to the new Salish keyboard. Some of these opportunities include an adult immersion program, language camps, and digital resources for learning and promoting the language. 

Source material:

With a crowdfunding campaign running until Nov. 14, the University of Montana Native News Project is hoping to bring in $5,000 total to celebrate the initiative’s 30th anniversary. Montana Native News is an annual reporting effort at the journalism school that gives honors students a firsthand opportunity to cover underreported stories from Indian Country. Participants work with professional Montana-based journalists in the field to develop the interviewing skills, photography chops and cultural competence to spotlight important issues for Indigenous Montanans.

Montana Native News is one of numerous crowdfunding opportunities currently accepting donations through the University of Montana Foundation. As of Oct. 26, the native news project had received $1,260 in donations toward its goal.

A contentious vote by the Crow Tribe Legislature last week ultimately killed an attempt to broaden the enrollment criteria for the nation based in southern Montana. 

Chairman Frank Whiteclay brought the proposal to give all currently enrolled members full 4/4 Crow Indian blood designations as an effort toward securing the tribe’s long-term sustainability.

The Legislature in Crow Agency voted 10-7 against the measure, citing concerns about the availability of federal funds for a larger population.

On Tuesday, Oct. 27, Montana State University will host a free event on campus with Ojibwe author David Treuer from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. Treuer released a new book – The Savage Mind: An American Legacy – earlier this month. His last book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, garnered awards including a Minnesota Book Prize and a California Book Prize.

The On Storied Ground: Voices of the Native West event will center tribal sovereignty, legacies of colonialism and storytelling that challenges popular narratives. The conversation takes place from 5:30–7:30 PM at the Great Hall inside the American Indian Hall on the university’s Bozeman campus. 

Source material:

Low voter turnout in a Kiowa Tribe special election did not meet the threshold to consider several constitutional amendments, including one that sought to reform enrollment guidelines to expand citizenship.

According to KOSU, out of 9,377 eligible voters, only 15% voted in the special election on Oct. 17, which is half of the 30% voter turnout tribal law requires to amend Kiowa’s constitution. Tribal voters even had the opportunity to lower this requirement during the special election. Voters were also asked to amend the constitution to make any current Kiowa citizen a full-blooded Kiowa, an attempt to increase enrollment in the tribe. Both measures had substantial support but failed due to the low turnout.

Kiowa Indian Council Coordinator Joseph Granado blamed the tribe’s primary source of information, Facebook. Granado told KOSU that the tribe’s election notices didn’t reach voters, and instead were flooded under Meta’s algorithm.

“Just like with state and national elections, it's hard to get turnout to meet those requirements,” Granado said. “That's the issue we're facing is that voter turnout amount.”

Recognizing the disproportionate impact of domestic violence on Native women, a nonprofit organization on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts is fundraising to build a new shelter space to better serve Indigenous survivors. Kinship Heals intends to break ground on the “Aquinnah Headwaters” shelter project in 2027, according to the Vineyard Gazette.

The shelter would be the first of its kind in Massachusetts with an explicit commitment to serving Native people who have experienced violence. 

The total project cost is pegged at $17.67 million. With a recent anonymous donation of $3 million, the nonprofit has raised $6.8 million — about 38% — of its funding goal.

In the evolving arena of Indigenous representation in American sports, New York issued a significant reversal Monday on its ban against offensive imagery for school sports logos. 

Since the New York Board of Regents enacted the 2023 mandate against portrayals deemed stereotypical by the Department of Education, local districts have pushed back. Jeff Capellini for CBS News reported one of those districts, located on Long Island, celebrated the decision to drop part of the ban. The Massapequa High School “Chiefs” fought to retain their mascot by reaching out to President Donald Trump and painting a large mural of their logo on the school building. 

The National Center for Education Statistics indicates Massapequa had a total student population of 1,407 in the 2024-2025 school year. At that time, five enrolled students were ethnically American Indian/Alaska Native and one student was Hawaii Native/Pacific Islander. The data showed 1,235 white students enrolled that year.

Predictive market gambling services offered by such companies as Kalshi, Polymarket and FanDuel are one step closer to being allowed to operate with less federal oversight than traditional casinos. 

On Monday, the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission released an interim rule that supports exemptions for those gambling products from certain regulatory oversight known as “swaps.” If approved, this means that bets placed on apps to predict weather, NFL games and other similar wagers would operate under different rules than bets placed at the blackjack table.

Before the rule becomes official, the federal government will take public comment on the matter. The deadline for comment is Nov. 16.

The concerns for Indian gaming is that the rule would harm operations and drastically alter the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. Codifying this reform, tribes say, would allow predictive market companies to continue operating in violation of state tribal gaming compacts. 

In September, the National Indian Gaming Association and National Congress of American Indians joined a roundtable discussion with the federal government about the proposed rule change. The lobby groups said it skirted federal law that requires tribal consultation on significant changes to federal laws. 

“The roundtable fell well short of that standard,” NCAI President Marc Macarro was quoted as saying in a statement posted by NCAI after the meeting. “Tribal Nations deserve a seat at the table when policies directly impact their sovereignty, jurisdiction, economies, and abilities to provide critical services to Tribal citizens.”

On Wednesday, NCAI moved forward a resolution urging tribes to use sovereign authority to issue violations notices to predictive market companies for operating on tribal lands illegally.

The Ypsilanti Township Board of Trustees has passed a cease and desist ordinance that forces developers of a new supercomputer project in Michigan to survey the land before they break ground to ensure that it’s not a Native American burial site.

University of Michigan representatives told MLive/Ann Arbor News that the area will be assessed to determine if there are any human remains underground. The supercomputer project is a collaboration between Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy.

The township, which sits southeast of Ann Arbor, is not a tribal nation or entity. The cease and desist notice demands the university do historical and archival research, an archaeological survey and a geophysical investigation before construction begins on the supercomputer project.

In rural northern Wisconsin, an effort bringing together the Mole Lake Sokaogon Chippewa Community and Nicolet College is intended to address broadband coverage issues in the region. 

Katie Thoresen with Wisconsin Public Radio reported that the tribe committed $72 million this year to create a 900-mile fiber optic cable network to serve some 4,600 homes. A new apprenticeship program will feed the pipeline of technicians needed to work on the network, which is expected to take shape over the next four years. 

The yearlong apprenticeship program to become a broadband service technician is expected to get up and running in the spring of 2027. The college offers an online application and resources to learn more about the new program.

Well over a year after the initial Senate reading for a Montana water bill in early 2025, the Crow Tribe finally saw its proposals signed into law on Oct. 15.

The Crow Tribe Water Rights Settlement Amendments Act of 2025 provides a new framework building on the 2010 water compact between the Crow and the state of Montana. Among the major new pieces of the law are updates to the Crow Reservation public water system and a five-year extension of the tribe’s exclusive right to develop a hydropower project at a dam on the Bighorn River.

The bill stalled from early March 2025 until that November, and then didn’t see any official progress made on its passage until September 2026. President Donald Trump received the bill on his desk on Oct. 5 and signed it into law 10 days later.