Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Photo: Workers from Alabama-based Dixie Electric Cooperative connect a newly installed power pole to the grid at the home of Persephonie Blackwater in the Navajo Nation. (Courtesy Deenise Becenti)

Nearly 17,000 homes on tribal lands still need electricity hook-ups.

A majority of them are spread across the Navajo Nation, where climate change makes it harder for families to keep cool.

The Mountain West News Bureau’s Kaleb Roedel highlights one program that’s changing lives.

It’s a scorching hot morning in the Navajo Nation.

In the foothills of Navajo Mountain, Leeland Tomasiyo is standing outside his home – trying to catch a breeze.

“We have a metal roof on top, you know? So all that heat just kind of builds up inside and it just cooks the place up inside.”

That wasn’t always the case. But Tomasiyo says the reservation feels hotter each year.

The Tomasiyos are one of 13,000 families living without electricity here.

That’s nearly a third of the homes on the reservation — which stretches across parts of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico.

A Navajo utility nonprofit started in the late 1950s to help change that, but progress has been slow since then.

A land dispute with the Hopi Tribe led to a development ban across 1.5 million acres for several decades. And getting a homesite lease approved and accepted for electricity development can take years.

Back at the Navajo Nation, the Tomasiyos are standing in their kitchen.

A coffeemaker and microwave are on the counter.

Paulette Tomasiyo says they’ve never been used.

“You wish you had all this stuff and you’re like, oh, these are gonna be on soon.”

She then points at the stainless steel fridge tucked against the far wall.

“Even this refrigerator. This is a fake refrigerator.”

But days without a refrigerator and air conditioning are now over for the Tomasiyos.

Their home was one of 170 on the reservation that got connected to the electric grid this year.

That’s thanks to a mutual aid program called “Light Up Navajo” that relies on private and federal funding – and volunteer workers.

“It just brings tears to my eyes. Every morning we get up and I just always think to myself, I’m just waiting, waiting – one day this will come.”

And now she says heat-related stresses no longer consume her.

An American marten in the Apostle Islands. (Courtesy Erik Olson / Northland College)

The U.S. Interior Department has awarded the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission nearly $1 million for recovery efforts for American martens, an endangered mammal in Wisconsin.

Judith Ruiz-Branch reports.

Martens have been trapped for their fur for various purposes.

Jonathan Pauli is a professor of forest and wildlife ecology at UW-Madison.

He says silvicultural practices and logging within local national forests altered martens’ preferred habitats.

“This work is really trying to understand how do we manage habitat in a meaningful way, on these working landscapes, to increase marten habitat, and connectivity of these different subpopulations to ensure martens are here for the foreseeable future.”

Pauli says the grant money, from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s America The Beautiful Challenge, will bring together a diverse group of folks from the federal, state, tribal and academic levels over four years to create a forest management proposal, with recommended habitat improvements for marten recovery in Wisconsin.

The project will also include training for future biologists and ecologists.

In the 1930s, martens were considered regionally extinct.

A series of regional reintroduction efforts has spanned nearly 60 years.

Pauli says martens play important cultural, economic, and ecological roles including the ability, as predators, to keep rodent populations at bay that are important carriers of diseases such as Lyme’s Disease.

With varying degrees of chestnut brown furs, they have distinct golden throats and are the size of a cat, with semi-retractable claws that help them navigate through forests and snow.

“They actually live and hunt underneath that snowpack, that they can slink in and out from underneath the snow where they can hunt all the mice that are living underneath the snow, and then pop up out of the snow bank, and they have big feet like snowshoe hares, almost, where they can surf on top of the snow.”

For the first time in a century, martens were spotted this year on Lake Superior’s Madeline Island in northern Wisconsin.

Ecology experts say this gives them hope for a positive recovery trend for the rare mammal.

Courtesy Cherokee Nation

Legislation being signed by Cherokee Nation leaders in Oklahoma paves the way for construction of cell towers across the reservation.

According to the tribe, the Cherokee Connect Broadband Initiative includes 15 communication towers to provide affordable and reliable high-speed internet and cellular service to 16 unserved and underserved communities in the Cherokee Nation.

The tribe received a $34 million federal grant for its broadband efforts, and expects to invest another $11 million into the effort.

The legislation was approved by the Cherokee Nation council during its December meeting and will be signed into law Wednesday.

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