Native Americans' fight for salmon rights continues; and they're subject to more discipline in New Mexico schools

In New Mexico, a detailed analysis of state records reveals that "Native American students are expelled far more often than any other group and at least four times as often as white students," reports Bryant Furlow of New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica. "Gallup-McKinley County Schools are responsible for most of the disparity. The district has a quarter of New Mexico’s Native students, but it accounted for at least three-quarters of Native student expulsions in the state during the four school years ending in 2020."

Furlow reports, "The state education department requires school districts to report all disciplinary incidents. Gallup-McKinley reported at least 211 expulsions over the four school years, an annual rate of 4.6 per 1,000 students. That’s at least 10 times as high as the rest of the state. The disparities persisted from elementary through high school."

A spokesperson for New Mexico Attorney General-elect Raúl Torrez called the news outlets’ findings 'alarming' but told Furlow that the office doesn’t have the authority to investigate civil-rights abuses by school districts or other public bodies.

Gina Laura Gullo, assistant director of education services at the Pennsylvania State Education Association, who did her Ph.D. dissertation on unconscious bias in school discipline, told Furlow she found that school administrators who scored higher on measures of implicit racial bias assigned harsher discipline to students of color than white pupils: "Infractions that are more subjective in nature such as disorderly conduct, insubordination, classroom disturbance and the like, are those that are specifically subject to more implicit bias.”

Salmon rights: The classroom isn't the only rocky battleground for Native Americas. Tribal fishing rights are also a fight for justice. Randy Settler is a member of the Yakama Nation, a tribe that has spent generations fishing along the Columbia River. He is fighting for his tribe's right to harvest salmon, reports Tom Schick for Oregon Public Broadcasting: "They had fought for their right to fish, a right the U.S. government promised to honor more than 150 years ago and then violated generation after generation through laws, policies and flat-out discrimination. He inherited that fight. Now, with climate change threatening the remaining salmon runs, he thinks about the legacy they left for him, the one he’ll pass down to his nephew, George, and to George’s 10-year-old daughter."

Columbia River watershed (American Rivers map)

The past 50 years have been marked with "many disputes over the federal government’s actions toward salmon and tribes," Schick writes. "Settler summed up the tribal position in his testimony before Congress at the time. Fish runs are in terrible condition, he told them: 'The United States is not living up to its commitments in the Treaty of 1855.'"

There have been some positive discussions that may help the Columbia River tribes including the White House recommendation that dams along the Snake River be removed and funding for the reintroduction of salmon of be provided.