NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

The Department of the Interior is the closest thing the US has to an explicitly colonial office. It is an office that overseas Native American tribes, the insular territories and also has obligations to deal with the freely associated states in Micronesia. It is for this reason probably the most interesting and exceptional place within the entirety of the US federal government. But this mandate is its least important function and one that matters very little in terms of general US interests or imagining. Overall its role in terms of managing national parks and providing oversight to resource extraction is far more visible. It is for this reason that in the general debate that is taking place within the US over Confederate monuments and attempts to whitewash and minimize racist and immoral parts of America's past, the Department of Interior enters the debate, not in terms of the Confederacy itself, but the way that certain heroes of American history, also participated in projects

After spending a week listening to the stories of Native Americans in Albuquerque and at the Indigenous Comic Con, my mind kept straying back to the story of one Native American woman, Elouise Cobell. As you can see from the articles below, she was a champion in recent Native American struggles to get redress and develop themselves economically after centuries of both abuse and neglect by the United States. She was just awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom although she passed away in 2011. I would have liked to have met her once and sat down and talked to her. What she and others accomplished in terms of suing the US Federal Government was inspirational on so many levels and largely unknown by the wider United States. ********************* Tester Announces Elouise Cobell Honored with Presidential Medal of Freedom November 16, 2016 Press Release (U.S. Senate)-Senator Jon Tester today announced that Elouise Cobell has been recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.