American Indian and Alaska Native Public Witness Day 1, Afternoon Session
House Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies
2025-02-25
Loading video...
Source: Congress.gov
Participants
Transcript
The committee will come to order. Good afternoon and welcome to the second session of our public witness hearing specifically focused on American Indians and Alaska Native programs. I would like to welcome all the distinguished tribal elders and leaders here today and thank our witnesses for appearing before the committee to share their perspectives on these important In terms of hearing logistics, I will call each panel of witnesses to the table one panel at a time. Each witness will have five minutes to present testimony. The full written testimony will be included in the record. As I said this morning, believe it or not, we actually do sit down and read the full presentation. So please don't feel pressured to cover everything in five minutes. We will be using a timer to track progress of each witnesses. When the light turns yellow, the witness will have one minute remaining to conclude their remarks. When the light turns red, I will have to ask the witness to stop to remain on schedule. And we're already behind schedule because they make us vote occasionally. We'll hear from every witness on each panel before members will be provided an opportunity to ask questions. I request that we try to keep things moving so that we can stay on schedule and respect each other's time. I also want to note that committee rules prohibit the use of outside cameras and audio equipment during these hearings. The hearings can be viewed in its entirety on the committee's website and an official hearing transcript will be available at GPO.gov. I'm now happy to yield to my friend, Ms. McCollum, who used to be the chairman of this committee and is currently the ranking member here. So thank you, Chairman Simpson.
And on behalf of ranking member Pingree and myself, I welcome you to our second public witness hearing convening tribal programs under the jurisdiction of the Department of Interior. Thank you for traveling to Washington. And as Ms. Pingree pointed out earlier, the Trump administration has only been in office a few short weeks, yet they've unleashed chaos and disruption into indigenous communities and created anxiety. An uncertainty for tribal members over their employment status, the continuation of critical health care, their educational services, and in some cases, even had their citizenship challenged when presenting tribal IDs. So I hope our witnesses today will use this hearing as an opportunity to sound the alarm. to make us hear clearly about what needs to be done. I thank you very much for coming and Mr. Chair, as I said earlier, unfortunately, I'll be back and forth and I think I might miss my fabulous Minnesota tribes this afternoon because of votes, but thank you. Thank you. Thank you, it's good to be here.
And in a few moments when we call the first panel, I'm gonna have Congressman Zinke chair the committee. We're all in different committees and crazy things all across. And these are the Montana tribes, and this is my Montana representative. So he'll chair this. But our first panel is Jeffrey, Harlan, and Ryan. Come on up. Anything you want, you're good to go. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Our first witness is Jeffrey Stiffarm, the president of the Fort Belknap Indian Community.
U
Unknown (SPEAKER_07)
Sir, the floor is yours. Well, good afternoon, everyone, and first of all, I thank the Appropriations Committee for allowing the Native American community to voice our concerns, and in particular, Chairman Simpson, which I consider a close friend of mine. I met with him several times. He has helped with our issues quite a bit back at Fort Belknap. But right now, more importantly, I would like to thank Congressman Zinke for allowing us to be here, the help that you have. You know, you are adopted to our people back at Fort Bonaparte, which you did in the SEALs, and being a commander for one of our members that was murdered, and what you did for him. So we adopted him to the Cinnabon people back home at Fort Bonaparte, and I want to thank you for that. Thank you for all the help that you have provided Fort Bonaparte, but not just Fort Bonaparte, but the Indian country in general. You did a lot for our people back there.
Sign up for free to see the full transcript
Accounts help us prevent bots from abusing our site. Accounts are free and will allow you to access the full transcript.