Last April, in a farm field in eastern Virginia, Ann Richardson gathered with a few hundred people for a celebration. It wasn’t a party, though. Several people were crying. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland was there. She was crying, too.
“I can’t really describe it,” Richardson said of that day’s event, which took place along the shores of the Rappahannock River. “Incredible. Surreal. Emotional.”
“I felt like we were surrounded by ancestors who had lived there thousands of years ago. We were standing in their hopes and their dreams for their people.”
Richardson is the chief of the Rappahannock Tribe, and on that Friday afternoon, her tribe took back more than 460 acres of ancestral land along the river that shares her tribe’s name. Last month, her tribe reclaimed another 960 acres of its homeland, too.
It took 350 years. It took survival, after her tribe was forced off of its homeland by English settlers in the 1600s, virtually erased by white supremacists in the 1900s and endured centuries of persecution sanctioned by the U.S. government.
It also took a new kind of partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as the Biden administration forges ahead with what it hopes will spur a seismic shift in the way the government approaches managing public lands: inviting tribes to be co-stewards of the land their ancestors were forcibly or illegally removed from by the government.
Since President Joe Biden took office, Haaland and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have signed off on nearly two dozen co-stewardship agreements with tribes. There are another 60 co-stewardship agreements in various stages of review involving 45 tribes. Haaland and Vilsack launched this effort in November 2021 with a joint secretarial order directing relevant agencies to make sure their decisions on public lands fulfilled trust obligations with tribes. In November 2022, the Commerce Department signed onto their order as well...
Republicans here, reeling from a midterm election rout that many blamed on the influence of former president Donald Trump, responded Saturday by spurning the former president’s choice for state party chair — and choosing someone even more extreme.
Kristina Karamo, who refused to concede her 14-point loss for secretary of state in 2022, beat former attorney general candidate Matt DePerno, who had Trump’s endorsement, in three rounds of contentious voting. The chaotic 11-hour convention, featuring a rowdy standoff over voting procedures and 10 candidates who all ran under a pro-Trump banner, left no doubt that the bulk of the party’s activists in this key battleground state remain firmly committed to election denial and showed no interest in moderating their message to appeal to the political center.
“Conceding to a fraudulent person is agreeing with the fraud, which I will not do,” Karamo said to cheers in her campaign speech on Saturday...
Bad, in the sense that people like these exist; good, in the sense that it makes it much more likely the key battleground state of Michigan will stay Democratic into the future.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, called on Saturday for President Joe Biden to be impeached over sending aid to Ukraine.
The GOP lawmaker retweeted a video clip from April 2022 of Biden vowing to support Ukrainian citizens amid the Eastern European country's ongoing war with Russia.
"Joe Biden will be impeached. Ukraine is NOT the 51st state!!! We are in over $34 TRILLION in debt, borders invaded daily by the thousands, and Americans have been poisoned in East Palestine. ENOUGH!!! IMPEACH BIDEN!!!" Greene wrote on Twitter on Saturday...
The ostensible leader of House Republicans and undisputed leader of the Congressional Putin Caucus wants Biden impeached for ... supporting the freedom and independence of a country invaded by a larger, authoritarian neighbor? That sounds on message for the fascist loon.
