Native American Press/Ojibwe News

This week in Indian country

It’s been an eventful week.

The opening salvos of the war in Iraq began Wednesday night. This overwhelming event far overshadows any other issues that we’ve been working on this week.

The full impact of the war is going to take awhile to become clear. Hopefully the war will be short, with a minimum of casualties and damage on both sides.

Press/ON invites our readers’ comments, insights, and perspectives, and we’ll start printing them next week.

Press/ON also invites those who have a family member involved the war to send a copy to this paper. For the duration, we’ll be printing their photos and short descriptions.

Indian people have served this country with distinction in previous wars, and I suspect that it will be no different this time.

Gambling
A news story that would have taken top billing in this paper, had the war not begun, is the introduction of the “Minnesota Gaming Equity Act” in the state legislature. The proposed legislation would establish an entertainment and gambling complex in the Twin Cites, with approximately half of the revenue going to the State of Minnesota, and the other half equitably distributed among Indian tribes and other programs.

The new bill is the third gambling bill introduced this year, and it’s anticipated that more bills will be introduced in the near future. Hearings on all three bills of the bills now before the legislature are scheduled next week.

Red Lake Ogichidaa
Another big story would have been the cap of another fine season by the Red Lake High School basketball team, Ogichidaa. As of this writing, they have reached the semi-finals of the State Class 1-A high school basketball tournament, and will play Ellsworth at 3:00 on Friday afternoon at the Target Center in Minneapolis.

We at Press/ON would like to congratulate them, and wish them well in their quest to bring the State Championship home to Red Lake.

Red Lake has always been known for supporting their teams, and I’m sure there will be a lot of Red Lakers to cheer them on at the Target Center.

Indian scholarship program
Because of the controversy surrounding the closure of the Bemidji office of the state Indian scholarship program last fall, and the recently introduced bill in the Legislature to re-open it, we embarked on an effort to review the effectiveness of the program and to report our findings. However, we found out that there have not been any recent audits of the Indian scholarship program by the Legislative auditor, and there have not been any annual reports filed for many years. It’s been hard to get enough information together to assess its management and effectiveness.

We are hoping to have more information by next week’s issue, and will present that to the legislature and to the community, so that consideration of moving the Indian Scholarship office back to Bemidji is based on solid information rather than emotion and politics.

The program is intended to benefit Indian college students, and it makes sense that as much money as possible spent as scholarships going directly to the students, rather than paying for high salaries and other administrative costs

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