Here is a summary of Native American-related news around the U.S. this week:
Mohegan chief announced as new US treasurer
For the first time in U.S. history, a Native American’s signature will appear on all U.S. currency: U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced the new U.S. treasurer: Marilynn “Lynn” Malerba, the lifetime chief of the Mohegan Tribe in Connecticut.
As treasurer, Malerba will oversee the U.S. Mint, the Bureau of Printing and Engraving and the storage of about $270 billion worth of gold at Fort Knox.
“With this announcement, we are making an even deeper commitment to Indian Country,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said during a visit to the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, home of the Sicangu Lakota.
Bears Ears National Monument Inter-Governmental Cooperative Agreement signatories stand in front of a newly-unveiled sign, June 18, 2022.
Utah tribes to co-manage Bears Ears National Monument
Federal officials and leaders of five tribal nations — Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service and the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni — on June 21 signed a joint government agreement, formally reestablishing the Bears Ears Commission, which will oversee land management of the 5,500-square-kilometer (2,125-square-mile) Bears Ears National Monument.
“Today, instead of being removed from a landscape to make way for a public park, we are being invited back to our ancestral homelands to help repair them and plan for a resilient future,” said Carleton Bowekaty, Bears Ears Commission co-chair and lieutenant governor of Zuni Pueblo. “What can be a better avenue of restorative justice than giving Tribes the opportunity to participate in…