Tagged: wind river

Tribal officials on the Wind River Reservation continue to seek answers after the Department of Energy announced that uranium was found in some residents' tap water.

DOE officials announced Wednesday evening that data collected last fall indicated that four households near a former uranium waste site had levels of uranium nearly twice the legal limit.

Dean Goggles is executive Director for the Wind River Environmental Quality Commission.

“I think we need to re-test again and look at the results and see what it shows us,” says Goggles. “But for the future for the site itself, we're still looking at it, we still have a lot of questions. I have to answer to the residents down there, so I have to ask those questions too.”

A recent report shows that 2010 revenue from Native American casinos grew a little over one-percent, down significantly from previous years.

The Indian Gaming Industry Report shows that in 2008 revenue growth ran about 39-percent… and in 2009 it shrank to nearly 10-percent. The new numbers rank Wyoming 15th in the nation, compared to 28 other states that have Indian gaming.

Alan Meister is the author of the report. He says despite the drop in growth, future improvements to revenue may be on the way.

In a February letter to the Department of Energy, Gov. Matt Mead expressed concern that the passive handling of uranium contamination on the Wind River Reservation might not be living up to the DOE’s remedial action plan.

The DOE asserted that the site would clean itself up after 100 years, and despite that uranium tailings were removed from the site decades ago, spikes in uranium were measured in DOE monitoring wells in 2010.

“My view is ‘hey, it’s in the state of Wyoming, it’s a state issue’,” says Mead. There is, in my mind, some confusion or at least doubt on how this last years flooding impacted that and whether or not this 100 year remediation process is accurate.”

The Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Interim Committee has passed a final draft of a wolf management plan. The state must maintain no fewer than 10 breeding pairs or a hundred individuals and would protect wolves in Yellowstone and the Wind River Reservation, designate them as trophy game in parts of the Western Mountains, and allow people to shoot them on sight in the remaining 85 percent of Wyoming.

Rep. Allen Jaggi of Uinta and Sweetwater Counties says the bill might not be perfect, but it’s a hard-fought effort to satisfy federal wildlife protection standards and Wyoming ranchers.

The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration is honoring a youth program on the Wind River Reservation for its efforts to prevent substance abuse and the spread of HIV.

This is the first time a Native American group has received a Voices of Prevention award. The Wind River Tribal Youth Program offers a range of health and social programs to kids from the Northern Arapaho Tribe. 

Executive Director Donna Trosper says substance abuse is a big problem among young people in the area.

“Alcohol leads to harder drugs, harder drugs leads to the gang mentality, whatever they’re watching on TV becomes something that they want to be a part of, because they’re not being a part of anything else,” says Trosper.

In the wake of a congressional hearing over a draft report by the Environmental Protection Agency that links hydraulic fracturing with water contamination in the town of Pavillion, the Wind River Tribes are pushing to take a bigger role in the investigation.

“It’s critically important that we really get into the center of these discussions, that we make sure that our sovereignty and our jurisdiction is not infringed upon in any way and that we make sure that our Wind River Environmental Quality Department and our unique legal and political relationship with the United States government is upheld in a manner that supports and upholds our jurisdiction and our authority,” says Eastern Shoshone Business Council Wes Martel.