The Biden administration has revised the rules that institutions and government agencies must follow to comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — a law long hampered by limited funding and the unwillingness of many museums to relinquish Indigenous remains and burial items.

This week, we're bringing you an episode about land, power, and history from our friends at NPR's Throughline podcast, and our play cousin Sequoia Carrillo. The word "reservation" implies "reserved" – as in, this land is reserved for Native Americans. But most reservation land actually isn't owned by tribes. Instead it's checkerboarded into private farmland, federal forests, summer camps, even resorts. That's true for the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe in northern Minnesota, where the tribe owns just a tiny fraction of its reservation land.

Forget about Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon”: We’re pretty sure the most anticipated debut related to Native Americans this year is a much-delayed and much-less-snappily named release from the U.S. Census Bureau known as Detailed Demographic and Housing Characteristics File A.

Native American communities in the Southwest are divided over new federal protections for land some tribes consider sacred.

This summer, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced new protections for an extraordinary archaeological site in New Mexico. The department put a 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco Culture National Historical Park, forbidding drilling for oil and natural gas. Many Native Americans consider Chaco Canyon sacred, but Native communities are divided on the new rule, as Alice Fordham with member station KUNM reports.

Members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians will vote Thursday on whether their Tribal Council should legalize the recreational use of marijuana on their reservation in western North Carolina.

Although the state still criminalizes the possession of even small amounts of marijuana, the sovereign tribal nation has the authority to regulate cannabis on the Qualla Boundary, the tribe’s 57,000-acre reservation. 

Jeanette Kiokun, the tribal clerk for the Qutekcak Native Tribe in Alaska, doesn’t immediately recognize the shriveled, brown plant she finds on the shore of the Salish Sea or others that were sunburned during the long, hot summer. But a fellow student at a weeklong tribal climate camp does.

They are rosehips, traditionally used in teas and baths by the Skokomish Indian Tribe in Washington state and other tribes.

“It’s getting too hot, too quick,” Alisa Smith Woodruff, a member of the Skokomish tribe, said of the sun-damaged plant.

The U.S. Interior Department on Tuesday unveiled a new program to bring electricity to more homes in Native American communities as the Biden administration looks to funnel more money toward climate and renewable energy projects.

The program will be funded by an initial $72.5 million. In all, federal officials said $150 million is being invested from the Inflation Reduction Act to support the electrification of homes in tribal communities, many of which have seen mixed success over the decades as officials have tried to address the lack of adequate infrastructure in remote areas.

The name of the football team playing in Washington D.C. is once again under question.

A group called the Native American Guardian’s Association (NAGA) is demanding the Washington Commanders change their name back to the Redskins, organizing support for the name reversal with a petition that has gained more than 90,000 signatures.

“We invite all Americans to stand up for the dignity of EVERY AMERICAN under assault in today’s increasingly nonsensical culture wars,” the petition says.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday will establish a new national monument protecting nearly 1 million acres of federal lands adjacent to Grand Canyon National Park from uranium mining and other development.

The site, named Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, will span approximately 917,000 acres north and south of the park. It is Biden’s fifth national monument designation as president and will advance the administration’s goal of protecting 30% of the nation’s lands and waters by 2030.

As Detective Kathleen Lucero drives along a dirt road towards the Manzano mountains east of her New Mexico Native American village, she recalls the time earlier in her career when an elder told his family he was heading this way to water his cows. He didn’t come back.

It was back in 2009 when Lucero was a patrol officer, learning how to stop her people becoming part of the U.S. epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women and relatives (MMIWR).