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White House releases $1B in grants to fund broadband in Tribal Nations

Vice President Kamala Harris announced Thursday that the White House is making available $1 billion in funding for Tribal Nations to fortify their broadband infrastructure. 

What You Need To Know

  • The White House on Thursday released $1 billion to fund broadband-fortifying projects for Tribal Nations
  • The funds were included in the $900 billion COVID-19 relief package enacted in late December of last year
  • Vice President Kamala Harris said the investment is only a “down payment” for rebuilding broadband services
  • Harris also called on Congress to pass the American Jobs Plan, which includes a planned $100 billion investment in broadband

The funds were included in the $900 billion COVID-19 relief package enacted in late December of last year, and indigenous communities can now apply for specific grants to cover various broadband-related projects. 

Harris was joined by Shannon Holsey, president of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians in Wisconsin and treasurer for the National Congress of American Indians, for Thursday’s announcement. Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo and Interior secretary Deb Haaland, herself a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, also joined the event. 

Holsey spoke first, touching on the “widespread patches of absolutely no connectivity” to broadband across many indigenous communities, saying the lack of access “creates even more vulnerability.” 

“Expanding broadband access would transform native communities, promote economic development, and empower Tribal Nation governments to provide critical services, including health care, education, public safety and emergency services,” Holsey said.  

Harris agreed, saying access to broadband is critical as it is “fundamentally how we create good jobs and economic opportunity.”

The grants can be used for projects ranging from laying down fiber optic cables, digital literacy programs, distance learning, broadband adoption activities and more. 

Still, Harris stressed that both the funds released Thursday —…

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Munsee

‘New Amsterdam’ Writer on Max’s Effort to Right Hospital’s Wrongs Against Native Americans

(Warning: This post contains spoilers for Tuesday’s “New Amsterdam.”)

“New Amsterdam” gave Dr. Max Goodwin (Ryan Eggold) yet another impossible problem to solve with this week’s episode of the NBC medical drama, which saw Max and the staff grapple with the historic name of the New York City hospital and the brutal past that the New Amsterdam moniker conjures up for a Native American patient of Lenape descent.

TheWrap spoke with “New Amsterdam” staff writer Shanthi Sekaran about what she and showrunner David Schulner were trying to explore with the episode, which features Tantoo Cardinal (“Stumptown,” “Dances With Wolves”) playing professor Jane Munsee, a Native American woman who has a large blood clot in her leg but refuses treatment at New Amsterdam because of what its name represents to her as a Native woman whose people lost their land to the Dutch colonizers who renamed it New Amsterdam.

See our Q&A with Sekaran below about Max’s efforts to right the wrongs made against Jane’s people by trying to change New Amsterdam’s name — and that special moment he shared with Helen Sharpe (Freema Agyeman) at the end of the episode.

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Where did the idea for this story about a Native American professor who refuses medical treatment at New Amsterdam because of its name come from?

We knew, [showrunner] David Schulner and I, we knew that we wanted to explore something having to do with Native American health, and our first thought was to go with something we’d been reading about, the Diné tribe, out west, also known as the Navajo tribe. But that didn’t make sense for a New York setting, because there is no reasonable reason that Diné people would come from out west to…

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