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Malaria outbreak among Indigenous Pirahã linked to forest loss, satellite data find
(news.mongabay.com)
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Last Updated on February 17, 2026 A newly published academic paper is calling for the creation of an Indigenous Global Media Network, arguing that Indigenous Peoples remain systematically excluded from global media systems at a time when international decisions affecting their lands, cultures and rights are intensifying. The proposal, published Monday in Frontiers in Communication, […]
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This story was originally published by KFF Health News.
Katheryn Houghton and Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez
KFF Health News
Leonard Bighorn said his mother tried for two years to get help for severe stomach pain through the limited health services available near her home on the Fort Peck Reservation in northeastern Montana.
After his mom finally saw a specialist in Glasgow, about an hour away, she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, Bighorn said.
Now, 16 years after his mother’s death, Bighorn has access to regular screenings for cancer and other specialty care that she didn’t have, through a health insurance program the Fort Peck Tribes created in 2016. The program, which covers most of the costs for the roughly 1,000 tribal citizens enrolled, is among a growing number of tribally sponsored health insurance programs.
Such programs vary by tribe, but they essentially screen and enroll people living within tribal boundaries in Affordable Care Act marketplace plans. They allow participating Native Americans flexibility to go to outside doctors and clinics when care through the Indian Health Service is unavailable.
“I’d be in a bind otherwise,” said Bighorn, a 65-year-old tribal game warden and member of the Dakota community.
But the Fort Peck Tribes now limit who has access to that coverage. Other tribal organizations that offer Native Americans similar coverage are struggling with rising costs, too.
The financial crunch began when congressional lawmakers allowed enhanced subsidies under the Affordable Care Act to expire on Dec. 31. Those tax credits, created under the Biden administration during the covid-19 pandemic, expanded subsidized health coverage for millions of people. By late 2025, ACA plans saw about 24 million enrollees, more than twice the number of pre-pandemic annual sign-ups. The cost of coverage shot up for most of those people as the expanded subsidies expired, and enrollment so far has dropped by more than 1 million people, according to federal health officials.
The subsidies had also boosted tribal health insurance programs, like the one Bighorn is enrolled in. The programs pay the price of each person’s share of premiums after subsidies, and the coverage lowers patients’ treatment costs. Now that premium prices have ballooned, so have tribes’ costs.
Rae Jean Belgarde, who directs Fort Peck Tribes’ program, said the higher costs leave the tribes with one option at this point: “Start limiting who gets help.”
The tribes are helping people shift to other insurance options and, in some cases, find state programs to cover their premiums. Tribal leaders also sent a letter to Montana’s all-Republican congressional delegation asking them to support extending the subsidies.
“Our program is saving lives,” the letter read. Belgarde said she didn’t know whether the lawmakers responded.
Scrambling for Solutions
U.S. House members approved a temporary extension of the enhanced subsidies in January. But that measure stalled in the Senate. Lawmakers are scrambling for an alternative after President Donald Trump threatened to veto an extension if a bill reaches his desk. On Jan. 15, the president released an outline of a health care proposal that includes creating savings accounts for people to pay their health costs — an idea Senate Republicans previously floated as an alternative to the subsidies.
A.C. Locklear, CEO of the National Indian Health Board, a nonprofit that works to improve health in Native communities, said tribes are “looking at ways to cut back just as much as everyone else.”
Native Americans as a group continue to face disproportionately high rates of chronic diseases. Their median age at death is 14 years younger than that of white Americans.
“Reducing access to even just general primary care has a significant impact on those disparities,” Locklear said.
Tribal leaders have said letting the subsidies expire further undermines the federal government’s duty to ensure adequate care for Native Americans.
In exchange for taking tribal land through colonization, the U.S. government made long-standing promises to provide for the health and well-being of tribes. Native Americans are guaranteed free health care at clinics and hospitals operated or funded by the Indian Health Service. But that agency’s chronic underfunding has created massive blackouts in care. It sometimes pays for patients’ outside care through its Purchased/Referred Care program, but that’s limited too. Due to funding shortfalls, the agency prioritizes which treatments it will pay for.
To help fill the coverage gaps, some tribal nations have built their own health insurance programs. When tribes pay health premiums, clinics and hospitals in their areas can bill for services that might otherwise go unpaid. Some tribes have leveraged that money to expand services.
“I don’t see tribes getting rid of these programs,” Locklear said. “But it will drastically shift how much tribes can really put back in their community.”
For example, Tuba City Regional Health Care Corp., in northern Arizona within the Navajo Nation, is unique in providing comprehensive cancer treatment on a reservation, Locklear said. The corporation, he said, estimates its costs to cover patients this year are increasing by roughly 170 percent to nearly $38,000 per month without the enhanced subsidies.
One of the newer programs is on the Blackfeet reservation in northwestern Montana, where basic health services can be hard to find. Medical visits are often offered on a first-come, first-served basis, and services vanish when staff positions go unfilled, said Lyle Rutherford, a Blackfeet Nation council member.
“Some of it is just getting a regular eye appointment, or a primary care appointment,” Rutherford said.
The tribe has been slowly building its health insurance program since launching it in 2024. Rutherford said the enhanced subsidies made that possible. Fewer than 400 people are enrolled out of an estimated 3,000 who qualify. In January, the tribe paused the employer-sponsored coverage portion of its insurance program, which at the time included 52 people.
He said tribal leaders are seeking extra funding to keep the program afloat, and he hopes Congress finds a solution.
Lives on the Line
The impact goes beyond tribes’ insurance programs. The Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based economic and social policy research nonprofit, estimates that 125,000 Native Americans will become uninsured in 2026 due to the higher costs.
Patients at the Oyate Health Center in Rapid City, South Dakota, are already reporting sky-high premium increases for ACA plans. CEO Jerilyn Church said it’s too soon to know how many will forgo coverage. But she said more uninsured patients would further strain the IHS Purchased/Referred Care program — with officials raising the bar for how sick patients must be to cover care outside of tribal health sites.
“There will be people that will not be able to get the care they need,” Church said, adding that could translate to “people losing their lives.”
Bighorn, the game warden on the Fort Peck Reservation, is among those still covered by the tribes’ insurance program. He has put it to use.
Soon after enrolling, Bighorn needed two hip replacements, surgeries that require off-reservation care and are ranked as low-priority procedures by the Indian Health Service. Bighorn said that in pre-surgery tests, specialists found the cause for his long-standing, dangerously high blood pressure. The diagnosis: untreated lifelong asthma and sleep apnea.
“I was a miserable man, tired all the time,” he said.
Without the tribe’s coverage, Bighorn may have eventually gotten those diagnoses but said it would have likely taken years to get help through the Indian Health Service. That would have meant getting much sicker before receiving care.
KFF Health News correspondent Arielle Zionts contributed to this report.
Correction: This article was revised at 3:45 p.m. ET on Feb. 13, 2026, to correct that the Blackfeet Nation halted only the employer-sponsored coverage component of its tribal insurance program and that average premium increases were approximately 70 percent.
The post End of enhanced Obamacare subsidies puts tribal health lifeline at risk appeared first on ICT.
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Eliot White-Hill, of Snuneymuxw Nation, guest-curated the newest exhibition at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art in ‘Vancouver,’ which runs until February 2027. Photo by David P. Ball
Every River Has a Mouth, the newest exhibition at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art, plunges deep into connections that flow between Salish artists on the province’s coast and its interior.
Guest-curated by Snuneymuxw artist and storyteller Eliot White-Hill, it’s his first collaboration with the acclaimed gallery in “Vancouver.”
“Salish art has its own total visual language, our own shapes,” White-Hill tells IndigiNews. “We use our own grammar.”
Too often, people assume West Coast “native art” is all the well-known northern Indigenous style known as formline, he notes.
“So really,” he says, “every opportunity we have to talk about that and to name it and to honor it in a way that people can learn through — that is really important.”
The exhibition opened Feb. 14 and features art from 11 creators in various mediums and stages in their career. It’s set to be on display for a full year.
The show considers the intergenerational ties between established Indigenous artists such as Angela Paul and Susan Point, White-Hill explains, and how their work has inspired the next generation of emerging artists.
Point, an acclaimed Musqueam artist, contributed a maple monoprint in the exhibition, and was credited with paving the way for many of today’s Salish artists across the province.
“Sometimes you have an idea for a work of Salish art, and it’s kind of like that meme of ‘the Simpsons already did it,’” he says with a laugh.
“Oh, Susan Point’s already done it.”
Revered Musqueam artist Susan Point contributed her 2005 maple monoprint piece Discover to the new exhibition at the Bill Reid Gallery of Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art in ‘Vancouver.’ Photo by David P. Ball
White-Hill says what was interesting about putting on a show of only Salish art is that many people are still only just learning what it actually is.
One example he gives is how totem poles are not traditional in Coast Salish culture, and yet Stanley Park is filled with them.
Another motivation was that curators often specifically focus only on either Coast Salish or Interior Salish artists, says artist and Bill Reid Gallery curator Aliya Boubard.
There have been very few exhibitions that feature both cultural groups.
“Even though there are a lot of similarities culturally, through families, through linguistics,” she says, “there is a bit of a divide when it comes to showing their work within institutions or galleries.”
It’s also been almost ten years since the acclaimed institution has hosted a major Salish exhibition, and “there’s been so many amazing up-and-coming Salish artists who have been working in that time,” Boubard adds.
One example from the show is And It Was This Big, an oil and acrylic painting from emerging Snaw-Naw-As artist Grace Edwards.
Snaw-Naw-As artist Grace Edwards’ oil and acrylic painting And It Was This Big, is displayed at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art in ‘Vancouver.’ Photo by David P. Ball
Her piece explores themes of keeping traditions alive and carrying art along in ways both new and old.
“What encapsulates all of these versions of keeping traditions alive is the multitude of fishing stories within my family, recalling past loved ones, the best fishing spots and who caught the biggest fish,” Edwards notes her artist statement.
Featuring a figure in vivid shades of dark purple, fuschia and pink, the piece also considers the importance of oral traditions and visual languages and the ways in which they flow “like our sacred waterways,” writes Edwards.
In a direct message, the artist tells IndigiNews,“I always learn new ways to re-enter and rethink how to perceive memories, stories and experiences through the formline language.”
syilx artist Taylor Baptiste’s 2025 installation, Continuum, is a twisting Möbius strip made from tule reeds and natural-fibre cords. The large suspended piece explores how in the artist’s words, ‘saʔtitkʷ — the river — is more than water. It is a living relation, an ancestor, and a teacher.’ Photo by David P. Ball
‘Culture travels and flows on these rivers’
Metaphorical rivers run throughout the show’s theme, and when thinking about its name, Every River Has a Mouth, White-Hill says there was one idea he kept returning to.
When learning Hul’q’umi’num he discovered that the word “qun” is added to a word to mean “language,” so his own dialect would be known as Snuneymuxqun.
But on it’s own, “qun” is the Hul’q’umi’num word for “throat.”
And the Stó:lō (“Fraser”) River is like a throat that connects the Coastal and Interior peoples.
“I took some liberties with the translation, in a way, by making it ‘mouth,’ but it’s still kind of the same,” White-Hill recalls.
As he learned more about the Hul’q’umi’num and Snuneymuwx languages, for example, and “far up the Fraser River in the Interior Salish world,” he said he found “so many things linguistically” held in common.
“From the coast to way inland, the culture travels and flows on these rivers,” he says. “And it’s what we share.”
Guest curator Eliot White-Hill discusses James Harry’s 2024 Welcome Gate, which is installed on the waterfront in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh. A photograph and carved model of the sculpture are displayed in the Bill Reid Gallery. Photo by David P. Ball
Líl̓wat artist Sydney Frances Pascal’s installation t̓iq i sts̓úqwaoz̓a | the salmon have arrived is made from more than 50 tanned salmon skins that fall from the venue ceiling like a waterfall.
Pascal was inspired by the memory of being at a fish camp in líl̓watǝmx with her family from Mount Currie in August when more than nine times the expected amount of salmon returned to the Fraser River.
“The river turned black because there was so much salmon, and that was only something I’ve heard told by family members as old memories from back in the day or written in books,” she says.
Pascal decided to create a new art piece to represent that memory.
“I’m holding on to it, because it’s so special,” she says.
“We never thought it would happen again, and also still — with how the environment in the world is going — I’m unsure if it will even happen in the future.”
Líl̓wat artist Sydney Frances Pascal created her installation ‘t̓iq i sts̓úqwaoz̓a | the salmon have arrived’ using dozens of tanned salmon skins. Photo by David P. Ball
Already familiar with tanning hides, she secured dozens of fish skins from her friend, fellow artist Janey Chang, who Pascal describes as the “fish skin guru.”
And then she began tanning them, using an extract from oak galls, sourced from growths on plants high in tannins.
But Pascal says it’s also possible to tan fish skins with successive soakings in concentrated black tea, too.
Pascal says she also wanted to include industrial materials alongside the natural ones as a reference to the modern world.
She cast cement salmon heads from her own mold, which peep out at the bottom of the cascading fish skins.
“It signifies the intervention of the modern world, and how that affects how our traditions, or how the numbers of salmon will either grow or dwindle, depending on if changes will be made.”
Every River Has a Mouth opened Saturday at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art in “Vancouver” and runs until Feb. 14, 2027.
‘Coast Salish weavings hold that knowledge,’ notes Angela Paul, ‘in a way that is fluid and adapting like the river, to an ever-changing environment.’ The artist’s woven-wool fashion designs — Coast Salish Nobility Robe, Apron, Headband and Ceremonial Mat — are displayed at the Bill Reid Gallery until February 2027. Photo by David P. Ball
The post Exhibition explores ‘total visual languages’ binding Salish peoples together appeared first on Indiginews.
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