Speculations about Alaska Native corporations having unfair advantages

The News Guy

2 weeks ago

Speculations about Alaska Native corporations having unfair advantages

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Alaska Native corporations threatened by changes to a federal program

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Alaska Native corporations are worried as the U.S. Small Business Administration is talking about changes to a program that has brought billions in revenues to disadvantaged companies, which make up just over 10 percent of all small business contracts.

Under SBA’s 8(a) program, socially and economically disadvantaged companies are given an edge in getting federal contracts over other small businesses.

The program has been a boon to many Alaska Native corporations, tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations, as well as Black, Hispanic, and Asian companies. Under the Biden administration, contracts with small disadvantaged businesses rose from 10.3 percent in 2018 to 11.4 percent of small business deals in fiscal year 2022.

Now, mentor-protégé joint ventures, which are designed to help smaller, newer businesses get better at what they do, are being scrutinized. READ MORE — Joaqlin Estus, ICT

Many Indigenous Democrats support a ceasefire

CHICAGO — The scenes outside compared to inside the United Center couldn’t have been more different on Thursday night, the final day of the Democratic National Convention. Uncommitted delegates, some of whom are Palestinian, were in tears and holding each other. After days of advocacy at the convention, it was final, their request to have a Palestinian-American address the convention to talk about the death, hunger and violence happening in Gaza was denied.

The 30 uncommitted delegates were there to represent the hundreds of thousands of voters who cast their ballots as a protest to show the Democratic Party they did not agree with the Biden administration’s stance on the Israel-Gaza War.

Simultaneously, the vast majority of the Democratic delegates were inside the convention celebrating and cheering. The momentum of the speakers was building in preparation for Vice President Kamala Harris to officially become the first Black woman, the first South Asian person, and the first woman of color to become the presidential nominee of a major political party.

As Harris outlined her stance for American voters on the Israel-Gaza War, she said sternly, looking forward into the at-capacity crowd, that she will always support Israel’s right to defend itself. READ MORE — Pauly Denetclaw, ICT

How a Native elections official is breaking down voting barriers

About a month before Arizona’s July primary, Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly and her older sister Elisa Cázares were driving around Three Points, a rural community between Tucson and where they grew up on the Tohono O’odham Nation, dropping off flyers for the recorder’s reelection campaign. Some 5,000 people live in Three Points, which leans conservative. The properties, an assortment of mobile homes and ranch-style houses, are separated by chain link fences, but their yards blend into the Sonoran desert landscape of mesquite trees, saguaros and chollas.

They stopped at a trailer whose address popped up on a canvassing app on Cázares-Kelly’s phone, programmed to scan voter rolls and identify homes of registered Democrats who voted in the last election. Old Volkswagens were rusting in the yard. There was a “beware dog” sign attached to the fence. No one came out to greet them, so Cázares-Kelly left her campaign materials wedged outside. Her sister made a note of it on the phone as a “lit drop.”

At the second stop, Cázares-Kelly — dressed in tennis shoes, distressed jeans and a black shirt that says “Elect Indigenous Women” in big white letters — had just tucked fliers under a car’s windshield wiper when a little girl opened the door of the house, followed by a woman sporting a slightly wary expression. READ MORE — The 19th

A Māori king who urged racial unity is laid to rest, a new queen rises

NGĀRUAWĀHIA, New Zealand — They came in their thousands in the freezing dawn, parking cars far away and winding down rural roads on foot, children riding on their shoulders. They arrived in mourning black with crowns of ferns and kawakawa leaves, bone carvings or wedges of deep green pounamu -– New Zealand jade -– resting on their chests.

The mourners came to the North Island town of Ngāruawāhia on Thursday to pay final respects to New Zealand’s Māori king, Tūheitia Pōtatau Te Wherowhero VII, who died six days earlier, and witness the ascension to the throne of his daughter, Ngā wai hono i te po. The new queen, 27, is the second woman to become Māori monarch in a tradition dating back to 1858.

As she was escorted onto Tūrangawaewae marae -– an ancestral meeting place — where her father’s casket lay draped in feathered cloaks, cheers rang out among thousands crowded around TV screens outside and waiting along the wide, flat banks of the Waikato River to glimpse Kīngi Tūheitia’s funeral procession. After her ascension, Ngā wai hono i te po accompanied the late king in a flotilla of traditional canoes along the river as he was guided by Māori warriors to his final resting place.

The events marked the end of a weeklong tangihanga — funeral rite -– for Kīngi Tūheitia, 69, a leader who had in recent months rallied New Zealand’s Indigenous people to unity in the face of a more racially divisive political culture than before. His daughter’s ascension represents the rise of a new generation of Māori leaders in New Zealand -– one which grew up steeped in a resurging language that had once almost died out. READ MORE — Associated Press

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