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‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ could cost tribes $1.5B climate funding, creates food assistance and health care barriers
(ictnews.org)
Amelia Schafer
ICT
Tribes are at risk of losing $1.5 billion in climate-project funding previously promised to them through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 as a result of cuts made in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a new study has revealed.
A months-long research project from the Brookings Institution released Feb. 5 identified the potential loss of $1.5 billion in climate funding, warning this loss could risk compromising tribal energy infrastructure and risks an increase of resource-extraction reliance. The Brookings Institution is an independent, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C.
The One Big Beautiful Act predominately targeted changes made in the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress in 2022. The Inflation Reduction Act previously authorized $433 billion in new spending for clean energy, community resilience, housing, infrastructure and economic development projects.
If fully implemented, the Inflation Reduction Act would have allocated $4.2 billion in federal investments to Indian Country. However, Brookings identified that only $2 billion in grants, direct payments and cooperative agreements has been dispersed to tribal governments, tribal colleges and universities, individuals living on tribal lands and Native enterprises at the end of the 2025 fiscal year.
Researchers said they did not identify names of tribes affected by this potential loss or specific projects in an effort to protect tribal data sovereignty.
The Trump administration has taken several actions to claw back climate funding and cancel outstanding climate-focused grants. One major fund entirely eradicated is the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, one of the largest funding streams headed to Indian Country.
The Big Beautiful Bill has rescinded a total of $27 million in funding towards climate-focused projects nationwide.
This loss of funding means tribes who were expecting project payments or had already begun construction for previously authorized projects will no longer receive their grant monies. As a result, the government will violate several treaty and trust obligations to tribal nations, citizens and communities as existing funding is inadequate, researchers said. Several treaties protect the right for tribes to access natural resources, such as fisheries, and protect tribal lands from significant degradation, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Several projects involve tribal response to coastal erosion, researchers said. In many places of the United States such as the northwest, east coast and gulf coast, coastal erosion is destroying tribal lands to the point where some tribes have begun to acquire more land and move entirely.
“There will be fewer opportunities for that type of work moving forward,” said Robert Maxim, Mashpee Wamoanoag and a research fellow at Brookings. “For me, coming from a coastal tribe, that feels really personal in a lot of ways.”
Several projects where ground was already broken and construction had begun in anticipation of authorized funding will now have to halt. These projects will likely be stuck in limbo for the foreseeable future if tribal leaders can’t identify alternative funding, Maxim said.
As a result, tribes will continue to have to live with existing funding deficits that the Inflation Reduction Act had attempted to resolve, said Glencora Haskins, a research associate and applied research manager at Brookings.
“These problems compound over time, degrading infrastructure, lack of clean water, contaminated soil,” Haskins said. “Those things don’t just stay in place. They worsen and worse and worsen.”
Researchers identified the federal government has authorized approximately $2 billion in federal funding to Indian Country since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. If grants would have grown at the same, previous rate, tribes should have received $3.5 billion in funding.
“Instead, that remaining $1.5 billion is never going to reach Indian Country,” Maxim said.
The One Big Beautiful Act did protect access to several programs serving tribal nations, researchers said.
The vast majority of climate funding that tribes receive does not come from tribal-specific programming, Maxim said. Only 15 percent climate program funds used by tribes come from programs specifically targeted towards Indian Country. The majority of funding obtained by tribes previously came from programs like the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, not tribal specific funds.
“So I think it’s a really important thing to remember that, again, even though the tribal-specific programs were protected in this bill, that’s actually just a small portion of climate change
funding that tribes have received in recent years,” Maxim said.
Potential barriers to accessing SNAP and Medicaid
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act added several new stipulations for obtaining Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid benefits. However, Alaska Natives, American Indians, urban Natives and California Native people are exempt from all new eligibility requirements, according to the National Council of Urban Indian Health.
While the exemptions give slight relief, Native people will face another barrier.
The bill requires states to use a process called ex-parte verification, or automatic verification. Through this process, states need to take every step possible to identify whether someone is exempt from work requirements without requiring that individual to submit additional paperwork, if possible.
But many state databases don’t include information like tribal enrollment, so the burden of proof is likely to fall on Indigenous people, Maxim said.
Tribal citizens and descendants with expired ID cards or paperwork may need to travel long distances to their tribal government offices to obtain new or renewed identification. Some tribal governments require these documents be obtained in person.
In some cases, obtaining documentation can also be costly aside from the actual cost of traveling to the tribal office.
“What we’re talking about here is a [potential] lapse in nutrition assistance or laps in health insurance for weeks or even months in some cases,” Maxim said. “When we’re talking about things like nutrition assistance or health insurance, a gap in coverage of several weeks or potentially more can be potentially devastating for people. I mean, if you don’t have adequate budgets for food, if you don’t have health insurance, if you have major medical issues, that can be a real problem.”
Exemption efforts don’t always come through either, Haskins said. Immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic, states began disenrolling Medicaid recipients, many of whom were Native American.
“The data shows is Native people were disenrolled from Medicaid at a higher rate than any other group,” Haskins said. “So it’s very possible that you’re going to see similar trends with the impact of these work requirements where Native people, who are disproportionately enrolled in both SNAP and Medicaid, are likely to be affected in pretty significant ways, even though they are legally exempted from these new work requirements.”
Now that the study is published, researchers said they hope to get the attention of congressional members and plan to recommend steps that Congress and states can take.
“I think that there’s conversations that hopefully can happen on the state level as well with different state Medicaid and nutrition assistance offices,” Maxim said. “I think there’s a lot for tribes to do to continue to advocate for the protection of benefits that Native people are legally entitled to under our trusted treaty applications.”
The post ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ could cost tribes $1.5B climate funding, creates food assistance and health care barriers appeared first on ICT.
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Photographs by Aya Brackett
Hello, horše ṭuuxi, I’m Vincent Medina. I’m Ohlone from halkin, in the San Francisco East Bay, and I grew up right here in my homeland, where my family has always been.
I’m Louis Trevino. Most importantly, I’m Vincent’s partner in life and in love, for which I am every day so very grateful. And I too am Ohlone from here in the East Bay, and I have dedicated myself to Vincent and to his beautiful and dynamic vision for our people and our land.
Medina: Our ‘ammatka Cafe, “the dining room” in our Chochenyo language, is high in the hills at the Lawrence Hall of Science, part of the University of California, Berkeley. The cafe is part of an initiative called ‘ottoy—meaning “to repair.”
A hundred years ago, UC Berkeley declared the Ohlone people extinct. That led to us being denied federal recognition, federal funding, and land rights.
‘ottoy acknowledges the rightful presence of us Ohlone through the exhibits of this museum, through other initiatives on UC Berkeley’s main campus, and also through land tracts associated with the university, all in partnership with Lawrence Hall. The central mission of ‘ottoy is to build up knowledge of and respect for our beautiful, living culture while acknowledging the harm that the university has committed.
‘The Dining Room’
Inscription above the entrance to the Lawrence Hall of Science. (Photo credit: Aya Brackett)
At ‘ammatka, we’re creating an understanding of our culinary traditions. As diners look out through the windows here, they see the East Bay hills, the flatlands, and the San Francisco Bay, which allows us to story-tell about how biodiverse, how special this landscape is.
In the days before colonization, the bay shore below was teeming with life—Olympia oysters, California mussels, abalone and Washington clams, sea otter colonies that would stretch so far into the water that they looked like cobblestones. White sand dunes interspersed with pickleweed marshes and tiny red California beach strawberries, gray whales sailing in through the Golden Gates, salmon going downstream through the Golden Gate into the Pacific Ocean and then swimming back up to spawn.
It’s a world that’s so beautiful you want to see it again, and these narratives are still passed down in our community. From that lush bay shore, you’d go into willow thickets that provided the foundational material for our beautiful baskets, which Ohlone people are known for. Then up into the redwood forests, filled with all kinds of mushrooms—the chanterelles, porcini, and candy caps, then down into the interior valleys full of oaks that provide acorn, our staple food, and up to Mount Diablo, the mountain of our creation.
Within this relatively small area that is the East Bay, there was a huge amount of biodiversity and abundance, shaped by the hands of Ohlone people for thousands of years. Our forebears consistently took out overgrowth with small burns that led to constant regeneration, enriching the soil with ash, allowing plant communities to continuously grow stronger.
At the ‘ammatka café, all signage is in English, Spanish, and Chochenyo, and the same is true throughout the Lawrence Hall of Science, where the cafe is located. (Photo credit: Aya Brackett)
That knowledge has never been lost, because our forebears have worked intergenerationally to preserve it, even through the hardest times of colonization.
Our families survived three successive waves of that here in the East Bay: the Spanish missions, where we survived at Mission San Jose and Mission Dolores; the Mexican occupation during the rancho period; and then the Gold Rush, when the State of California legalized genocide against our Ohlone people as well as Indigenous people all throughout the state. The first American governor of California said, in 1851, that “a war of extermination will continue . . . . until the Indian race became extinct.”
When the violence was heavy, our family moved into the interior valleys of Sunol, about 35 miles southeast of Berkeley, and successfully secured land rights as the Verona Band of Alameda County. My great-grandmother was born there. Traditional culture continued to flourish there from the 1860s until the late 1920s.
In 1868, through the Morrill Act, UC Berkeley, a land-grant institution, was founded and directly benefited from the theft of Indigenous lands. Then in 1925, the university wanted to seize our land in Sunol, to turn it into a place of recreation for university men. That was when Albert Kroeber, first head of anthropology here at UC Berkeley, declared the Verona Band “extinct for all practical purposes,” which led, two years later, to the loss of federal recognition and land rights for us Ohlone people.
Our great-grandparents’ generation found ways to transcend. When they couldn’t live on their land in Sunol, they worked hard to stay here in the East Bay, working in orchards, washing the clothes of white folks, but maintaining their dignity and maintaining the culture.
Because of them, here we are today, where every generation of our family has always been. Colonization does not define our story. Our story is about joy, celebration, and about how victorious the generations before us were in keeping the oldest traditions of the East Bay alive. That’s not a story of loss or defeat. That’s a story of incredible strength and permanence.
A hundred years from the time that the university erroneously declared us extinct, here we are correcting those words and having the last say, working in partnership with the Lawrence.
Cooking With Old-Time Knowledge
We first started cooking in 2017, when we launched mak-‘amham (Chochenyo for “our food”), a series of programs for our Ohlone people: cooking classes, gathering trips, dinners and food deliveries for elders, and language classes.
We wanted to follow old-time knowledge and old-time taste preferences. So we would spend a lot of time talking to the elders about the foods they grew up with. They really missed them, because many traditional Ohlone foods had become inaccessible because of development on our land, privatization of land, and restrictions on gathering within park districts that existed until relatively recently. With mak-‘amham, we started cooking for a core of individuals so they could have access to traditional foods, and also so we could learn to cook with our elders’ leadership.
A greeting from the East Bay Ohlone people in the gardens of Lawrence Hall. (Photo credit: Aya Brackett)
My great-aunt Auntie Dottie, who is 95 now, learned a lot about the old traditional foods from her mother, who was born in 1890. Auntie Dottie would talk about how at every family gathering when she was young, there would be acorn on the menu. She calls acorn “the bread of life.” And greens that her mother would gather, and how delicate their taste was. All these different greens had their own flavor, she said, and would be layered with nuts, fruits, and berries to create something that was rich and full. They included watercress and also rooreh, what was previously referred to as miner’s lettuce.
We did a video about this, because the miners were terrible to our Ohlone people and to California Indians across the state. We found it to be unjust that miners got associated with such a delicious green when they were only eating it for 10 years or so, and we Ohlone have been eating it for thousands of years. In the video, I said, “Let’s not call it miner’s lettuce. Let’s call it by its Native name. And if you can’t remember that, just call it ‘Indian lettuce.’ ” The Jepson Herbarium saw the video, and they changed its name to the Chochenyo name, rooreh.
Trevino: Auntie Dottie grew up in the height of the Great Depression in the 1930s, in a town that was called Alvarado, which is now part of Newark / Union City in the East Bay. It was not an easy time to grow up, but she never felt a sense of lack because her mother knew about all these plants, and mushrooms, and fruits, and other things she would teach her children to gather. In fact, their home was a place where other people would come because they knew they could have a meal.
Also, in the 1920s on the Sunol Rancheria, our Ohlone forebears recorded as much as they could about language and the old-time stories, but also really beautiful recipes and descriptions of foods that were eaten in the 1800s.
One of them was acorn bread cooked in a wrapping of sycamore leaves. Another one is the seed cakes, muyyen. They’re made of chia, California amaranth, tarweed, and sometimes lupin seeds, toasted and then ground into flour and shaped into slender little cakes. Each seed has its own unique flavor—some taste like anise, some like burnt popcorn. They all complement each other, creating ultra-nutritious, very delicious cakes full of good fats, protein, and fiber.
Cafe Ohlone, our first restaurant, came out this project with our elders, serving almost entirely pre-contact foods; it closed in 2020 with the pandemic. Our occasional seasonal restaurant, ‘ottoytak, also at UC Berkeley near the Hearst Museum, continues. And now we also have the ‘ammatka Cafe at the Lawrence.
A freshly planted pollinator garden at the Lawrence, part of the ‘ottoy initiative’s land restoration. Ohlone elders remember wildflowers carpeting this hillside, so bright they would hurt your eyes, says Vincent Medina. This spring, with any luck, they will bloom again. (Photo credit: Aya Brackett)
One of the really beautiful things we’ve both learned from our elders is this idea that you trust the way a dish is being described to you and the way that it’s always been done. And now, we’re applying that trust to our cooking today, as we’re regaining access to gathering places and increasing our gathering rights. Not asking why, but just doing it, and then tasting the final dishes and finding that, of course, they’re delicious, and then sharing those dishes with the family through our work. It’s a beautiful process of closing that circle.
‘ammatka Cafe’s Food Culture
Medina: The older generation had such confidence in the kitchen without using measuring cups—they just seasoned until the flavor was where it needed to be. Louis’s grandmother Mary Lou Yamas had these ways of measuring salt and other seasonings on her palm by the size of the circle it made there.
At ‘ammatka, we have a culinary team in the kitchen, and you can’t always describe seasonings by the size of the circles they make. As culinary directors, it’s been a very fun process to standardize our experiences in cooking.
We also procure the gathered ingredients and co-lead an Indigenous garden with the Native American Student Development center here at UC Berkeley. It’s growing food for the cafe, like native onion, native berries, and watercress. Otherwise the ingredients are from local markets and farms.
Cafe Ohlone was almost entirely a pre-contact menu, but ’ammatka Cafe is very 2026. We have tater tots, because young people like tater tots! Everything, though, is paired with traditional ingredients to build up understanding. So the tater tots are served with an herbed aioli that has native tarragon, native onion, and sage that’s gathered, dried, and made into a flour.
We also have an Ohlone salad, made with watercress from the Indigenous Garden, as well as native onions, blackberries, gooseberries, dried California strawberries, edible flowers, pickleweed from the marshes, and purslane. And a smoked-duck sandwich—we traditionally hunted duck on the bay shore—with house-made rose-hip jam and Mt. Tam triple-cream cheese.
Louis Trevino (left) and Vincent Medina in the ‘ammatka café, with a view of Ohlone homelands. (Photo credit: Aya Brackett)
Louis developed his Ohlone brownies years ago, for mak-‘amham, wanting to introduce acorn flour, chia flour, and hazelnut flour to Ohlone youth. Little by little, he was planning on getting rid of the chocolate, but the elders would hoard the brownies, grabbing them even when the kids were around. They told Louis, “You don’t get rid of those brownies, Louis.”
It’s a reminder that traditional and contemporary can coexist. That’s part of a living culture, and us being able to tell our story, even if it’s not exactly the same as it was 200 years ago. It’s change on our own terms, and this menu does that.
An Ohlone Food Future
We also lead the mak-warép (“our land”) Ohlone Land Conservancy, focused on restoring lands here in the East Bay using traditional knowledge and land stewardship practices.
We’re in the middle of planting three 1-acre gardens at the Russell Research Station in Lafayette—a basketry garden, a medicinal garden, and a culinary garden—so that we have readily available Ohlone foods for the older generation who really crave these foods.
We are also developing our relationship with the East Bay Regional Parks. Only a few years ago, gathering in the parklands was criminalized. We are working toward full gathering permits and access throughout the park district.
And we are aligned with Hog Island Oysters and the Wild Oyster Project to restore our native West Coast Olympia oysters within our lifetimes.
Other Ohlone land stewardship practices, like our cultural fire burns, are coming back into practice. I’m proud to say that we had our first cultural burn last October in two generations, and now we’re working with Cal Fire to plan more. This system worked so well for us in the past that in Chochenyo we have no word for famine, but we do have a word for abundance—yowwini.
What we would like to see now are changes in policy so we are able to reacquire land. Because then we could implement the full spectrum of land stewardship practices—from cultural burns that enrich the soil to traditional irrigation and coppicing methods to growing a wide variety of plants that we know would do well in our microclimates.
Our vision of an ideal food future would include seeing our people respected as a force in the East Bay culinary landscape.
It would be such a wonderful thing if, when people think about the East Bay, they think of Ohlone cuisine and how you can taste the landscape through our foods—chanterelles from the redwood forests, pickleweed from the bay shore, acorn from the oak woodlands. It doesn’t mean erasing or negating other foods, because the East Bay is a very cosmopolitan food scene. But it means centering that which is Indigenous. When people associate the foods of this place with us Ohlones, they don’t question if we’re here in our home; they just accept it as an inherent fact. And when they get to taste place-based knowledge, that uplifts our culture, builds up respect, and is pleasant for everybody involved, whether they are Ohlone or not.
This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The post Through Food and Culture, the East Bay Ohlone Are Repairing Centuries of Harm appeared first on Civil Eats.
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Bangladesh’s political parties share manifestos, leave environmentalists frustrated
(news.mongabay.com)
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Kalle Benallie
ICT
With the unpredictable and chaotic nature of American politics, National Congress of American Indians President Mark Macarro was adamant that tribes should remember their power and protect tribal citizens, while giving the 2026 State of Indian Nations address on Feb. 9.
“We are sovereign tribal nations, and we will never back down,” Macarro said.
The speech, which was Macarro’s third, outlines priorities for the tribal advocacy organization and is given at the start of NCAI’s Executive Council Winter Session in Washington, D.C.
Macarro, who is also chairman of the Pechanga Band of Indians, said full funding for healthcare, education, housing, infrastructure, law enforcement, and disaster relief must be given for Indigenous communities.
“For Congress to fulfill the United States trust responsibility to Indian Country, the entire tribal budget must be funded. An annual non-competitive based budget, or give our stolen lands back. Let’s state this truth clearly. There is enough. There has always been enough. The only scarcity is political will,” Macarro said.
Macarro reiterated that tribes need to come together to meet the moment.
“Let’s walk forward together in unity, in strength, and abundance, and commit to one another that we will not just survive this moment. We will shape it,” he said.
Traditionally, a member of Congress gives a response to the State of Indian Nations. This year, U.S. Senator Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat, was afforded the opportunity. Smith was previously recognized by the organization in 2024 when she was awarded the Congressional Leadership Award for her dedication to Indian Country.
Despite being set to retire at the end of her term later this year, Smith vowed to continue to fight on behalf of tribes in the halls of Congress.
“I will work as hard as I can on food sovereignty in the Farm Bill, to pass the Protect Act, and to address the critical housing shortage in Native communities. I will push, relentlessly, the federal government to uphold its trust and treaty obligations, and to meet those obligations, and to honor your sovereignty,” Smith said.
Smith added the recent ICE activity in Minnesota has been affecting all citizens including Indigenous people who are being detained or questioned about their U.S. citizenship.
“This U.S. Constitution recognizes, it does not create, it recognizes tribal nations, inherent sovereignty, and the rights to govern yourselves. The sovereignty is not created by the United States or our treaties or our constitution. It is inherent, and it is fundamental,” Smith said. “And it is the starting place for all of our mutual agreements, and treaties, and obligations. And it cannot be abrogated by any leader.”
NCAI presented Smith with a blanket to thank her for her service.
Co-presidents of the NCAI Youth Commission Jonas Kanusha and Angelina Serna also spoke at the State of Indian Nations. Kanusha said Native students should not have to carry their tribal ID’s or passports on campuses when they are on the way to class.
“Our Native youths go to college to learn, to grow, and to bring back knowledge back to their communities, not to be treated as suspects in their own homelands. We stand in solidarity with all students who are living in fear, and we call all institutions and policy makers to ensure that campuses remain safe spaces for learning and community, not sites of intimidation,” Kanusha, Oneida and Turtle Mountain, said.
Serna, Oneida and Turtle Mountain, honored former American Indian Gaming Chairman Ernie Stevens Jr., who was a vice president at NCAI. At the 2025 NCAI Annual Convention, the Youth Commission renamed their Youth Warrior Ward in his honor.
“His loss has affected us deeply, but his legacy will live on through the NCAI Youth Commission, and through every youth leader who steps forward, knowing that they belong in these spaces because Chairman Stevens believed in us. We carry his vision forward by continuing to invest in youth, protect their voices, and create pathways for them to lead,” Serna said.
Kanusha said reductions in staffing and resources in tribal colleges and universities are affecting resources for Native youth like mentors, mental health services and financial support.
In response, a 2025 mid-year resolution titled “Upholding Trust and Treaty Obligations for Higher Education Access” was passed this year.
“Our students deserve better than broken promises,” Kanusha said. “This crucial legislation declares our opposition to harmful cuts to Pell Grant funding and eligibility and reaffirms our commitment to supporting higher education for Native students.”
Kanusha and Serna outlined priority initiatives for this year as: financial literacy, land and water protection, community and relationship building. Some other actions they are working on include substance abuse issues and reclamations of Indigenous languages.
“These priorities will guide the youth commission’s work as we continue to advocate for the next generation. But our youth cannot do this work alone. We need the strengthened wisdom of our communities to guide us through,” Kanusha said.
Executive Director of NCAI, Larry Wright Jr., Ponca, closed the event by thanking tribal leadership’s dedication to self-determination and protecting tribal sovereignty.
“When we stand together, we amplify our voice, hold decision makers accountable, and ensure that the rights, cultures, and futures of our nations remain protected,” Wright said. “Let us move forward with purpose, honoring those who came before us while building pathways of opportunity, safety, and prosperity for those who will follow.”
The post NCAI President Mark Macarro: Tribes “will never back down” appeared first on ICT.
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